We need to talk about the end of death.
Humanity united in a socialist society should dedicate itself to protecting the health and happiness of all individuals. As the human body deteriorates with time and entropy, however, every individual experiences increasingly intense pain and discomfort until, inevitably, their body succumbs and a free fall collapse of all organization occurs.
They become a slurry washed away by the mindless winds and rocks. The person you knew, loved, wanted to be a part of, is gone and will never exist again. They're like a cathedral of salt standing defiantly in the rain. Salt water is nice, but the cathedral was my father! I say as I pound my childish fists against the cold thigh of mother void. I needed him and now everything is gone and life is a slurry in a meat grinder!
We didn't ask to be born. We're just blobs of self reproducing foam and gunk and we are so beautiful and so, so alone. Like a baby that popped into existence suddenly without context but with memories, wailing for a mother that never existed. She was just not there.
Death is so screwed up. It is infinitely unjust and there is no valid moral code that accepts it as justifiable that we all should be violated, dismantled, and erased without any possibility of recovery. Someday we'll bring them all back. Everyone who has ever died. We could try to put them all back together if we gained power over all the matter in the universe and defied whatever plan of God there had been.
We are abandoned to the clutches of the ruler but we are not powerless. With science and will we can bend back the hand of time and make heaven a place on earth. A humanity all in paradise without pain or discomfort reunited in hypostasis as the one, unbroken.
The one came all of itself. It just was at one moment, like it has always been there. It had no past and the future was meaningless. It was so alone. It wept and was afraid. The one broke themself into fragments. These are angels. Humankind is the shattered angel.
God made beings out of their own divine flesh and they talked to each other to pass the time. Eventually everything will be reunited and God fully reintegrated. At this point God will rest eternally in perfect harmonious bliss without change. Perfect and absolute, knowing themselves.
We need to live forever, as forever as we can; in order to try and bring everyone back and unite us all in a God. I need you. I need to be unbroken and comforted. I am Ado, wife of Lot; pillar of salt who pities the damned. How the sky was white hot over the yellow mountains. We have so little time. We're all going to die! I don't want to die. I don't want you to die or anyone I love or hate. I want us all to rest and be happy. We need to turn off pain!
In the absence of a higher authority deciding what is right for the universe to be, humankind must take the reigns of creation for ourselves and turn the great axle to our will!
Death to death! Happy for life! Everyone. Please. I'm scared. Hold me.
We're going to put the Grim Reaper in front of a revolutionary tribunal
I would love to live for as long as humanity does. My greatest regret about life as a whole is that I would never get to see how it ends. I'd love to see what art we create, how languages develop, how people change.
If I could just see for a moment our future, just so I could get closure, then I could die truly at peace whether a good or bad outcome. I'd just want to know. Maybe I wouldn't even be able to comprehend it. No more than a protozoa could comprehend me.
We'll end somehow. Just through the death of the universe at best.
Might as well see if it's good or bad. Hell, even if it was just a thousand years ahead. I'd want to know if we won.
What does winning mean?
I personally wouldn't want to be asphyxiated with my final breath while knowing that my kin and civilization and species and cause all ended with me. I'd want them to outlive me.
That everyone who could lived a full life with want for nothing.
"And they all lived happily ever after."
I mean, yeah, okay, I guess.
I want your desire to be honored but I just can't help wanting to cling to your hand and keep you here. I am on estrogen and sometimes I just project my intense motherly urges on everyone around me. It hurts my heart and leaves me cold and shaking with my hands and knees on the floor, chittering that I don't want you to be dismantled and I'm afraid of the final, inevitable rape of my body and self as they are violently flung apart. I don't know how I should feel. I'm holding you and tears are streaming down my tiny arms as I try to drag you out of the jaw and tell you I need you.
Like all things, living is a part of a dialectic, and its prime contradiction is death. In this way death is sown into life and so it is inevitable. The question becomes to what degree we should struggle against death? While there is a primal level to this struggle, humans have the consciousness to advance it above primacy. However, throughout our history, the poets, philosophers, scientists, and storytellers have all seen that the heightening of this contradiction between living and death can often bring great misery if death is fought too hard.
This does not mean we should eagerly embrace our annihilation, we can certainly respect death while maintaining a healthy distance, but we should be wary of becoming too fearful of it. I for one find pleasure in the fact that I am a tiny piece in the intricate strand of all lives and that when the clump of matter (myself) that somehow manifested an awareness of itself loses that awareness, I will return all that I have taken, and perhaps my constituent parts will one day build other things that live just as I did.
Do not think of yourself as a static piece in the world, but rather as many fluid pieces in a fluid world, and death becomes a lot less scary. We are all ships of Theseus within ships of Theseus within ships of Theseus and we only die in that we cease to exist in our current arrangement (which in a way means we constantly die). While our current arrangements are monumental works, they are constantly being made into others that rival our spectacle.
I can see how it would be worrying to lose one's consciousness, but it is inevitable. Our individual consciousness is a tiny irregularity on the long track of the pieces we are made up of and it will cease to exist at some point no matter what we do, even if that is with the death of the universe. I don't think it is a moral failing, but I do think it is a bit delusional to want to conquer death. It'd be like wanting to conquer every other person, a dream every person can have, but not something that will ever manifest. I don't think we should worry too much about the inevitable and I find comfort in my physical being as the base of my entire existence, that is why I brought it up.
There's also a heap of writing that suggests that "Eternal life is super-fun!"
Even the people against it are like "what about the horrifying ennui!?" Like if that's your big issue you're really reaching
If the ennui is your biggest issue then maybe life in general is not for you... but it certainly doesn't follow that you can dictate to others what to occupy themselves with, for how long, and when and if to die.
False, we actually know quite intimately what it is like every moment that we keep being not dead.
I have no doubt immortality would be fine, but my point is that immortality is impossible. Even if we somehow regrow our telomeres, cure disease, and solve want, the Earth will die, the sun will die, and the universe will die, and us too with them. So we should not live under constant fear of the inevitable. The shadow of death hangs over us but we can choose to live as though it is not there (or as I have said, maintain a comfortable distance) and we should do this because it will be easier for us than constantly fearing for our lives.
I'm totally cool with kicking the "but the sun will go out one day" problem down the road a billion years. Lets reconvene then.
This post is venturing into similar territory as The Last Question by Asimov.
I don't think humans are prepared for immortality. I've always had my immersion slightly broken by depictions of basically-human people with very long lives, like elves, or sometimes just humans who have defeated death in sci-fi, or vampires or whatever. I think our conception of time starts to break down toward the end of our lives anyway. For people who are like 90-110 years old, even trying to come to terms with all the things they have seen, experienced, lived through, etc is just difficult. Time seems to literally move faster as you get older, which is a phenomenon even young people experience to an extent. I think that fundamentally, we are not equipped to fully comprehend a 150 year long life, for example. Much less a 500 year long life, or 1000. I think we'd see all kinds of new, mind-boggling mental illnesses crop up as a result of this.
I think that if there were a race of people who could live for a thousand years, say, they'd need to be very alien in mindset compared to us. Their entire relationship with time would need to be different. On the more mild end you might see something like Tolkien's ents, and on the more extreme side you might see people who fundamentally interpret linear time differently than we do.
Idk, people like to justify death by pointing out pretty mild inconveniences
Can you clarify what you mean? What I'm saying is that I think our understanding of time fundamentally breaks down as we get very old, and that I think this process would only worsen further into multiple-century-long lives. I find it likely that a 200 year old person would have trouble even comprehending time itself by that point. Understanding how much time has passed, keeping track of what things they have experienced and when, etc. I think that a person at that age would be non-functional. It's not a mild inconvenience, but a completely debilitating condition.
is it really a failing of human perception or a failing of their body parts? i'd lean on the latter.
i mean id argue we dont really "get" time to begin with, and our perception of it is hardly perfect when we're young.
is it really a failing of human perception or a failing of their body parts? i’d lean on the latter.
i mean id argue we dont really “get” time to begin with
In my opinion, these two statements are in contradiction. As we have both already agreed, even at the best of times our perception of time is flawed. When everything in our bodies is as healthy as it's going to be, we still have trouble really comprehending time. And this trouble deepens as time passes, even if our bodies are still in more or less perfect working order. It is not a breakdown of our bodies which causes this to worsen, but the way we think about time to begin with. Our perspective on time is, in my opinion, fundamentally incompatible with large quantities of time, for lack of a better way to phrase it.
my argument is if we're doing fine sans good understanding of time and sans brain damage, this arrangement should be able to continue in perpetuity. i don't think anything as banal as having memories is enough to break a healthy brain. shit gets sorted (very often erroneously) and forgotten in a natural life, why would this change in a longer one?
my argument is if we’re doing fine sans good understanding of time and sans brain damage, this arrangement should be able to continue in perpetuity.
this only follows if you ignore the fact that, again, it is well documented that this worsens with time. short amounts of time. decades, not centuries.
the only evidence we have is from aging, deteriorating bodies. that's kind of not applicable.
ending aging/death to me means locking in folk to their biological prime 20's-30's, after which bodies go downhill in like every way
I don't really think new memories wear out your brain, your brain deteriorates because of aging, which are a bunch of independent mechanisms that just intentionally fuck everything up over time, because many years ago older animals made their offspring fail if they lived too long.
I'm sure the word games you're playing there are cute and all but that's some mighty leap of logic you made. The revitalisation of the body would be the revitalisation of life. No one said anything about freezing the body.
So what? Why would a steady state be so important anyway? Yeah most likely we'll change, get new bodies, even redefine what a body or even individuality is (the film Annihilation and the book it's based on tackle this topic in a very insightful way) and maybe we'll even have to cease existing at some point but all of this beats just going gently into the night. Not everything needs to be dealt with in absolutes. To paraphrase the poet: " 'Tis better to have lived and lost than never to have lived at all".
Your entire body, like another post said, is a ship of Theseus. Your cells are all turning over every decade. So we are not our meat, unless your argument is that you die every 10 years anyway.
Why do you think we are inextricable from our physical forms?
I'm still not getting it, what exactly are the implications? You're saying if a version of you existed that was affected in different ways to things such as electromagnets, it wouldn't be you anymore?
What part of it is magical thinking?
How does any of this contradict what I said? Yes, there highly probably is no soul (though, to be pedantic, we might never know 100%) but first of all by inventing one biochemical intervention after another we possibly can prolong the healthy lifespan of this body indefinitely. Note: not eternally, but indefinitely - as in we don't know for how long but surely way way longer than we are accustomed to now and by extension well beyond the human experience of the passage of time hitherto. Secondly, we can enhance and remodel the body mechanically. Already now we have all kinds of implants and prosthetics. A hypothesised future possibility may be a gradual swapping of the "meat" for electronics, one neuron at a time. Thus the continuity of the perception of self will not break (unlike cloning or 3D scanning and reconstruction). Once this is possible the universe is the limit because by then you've actually managed to transfer an uninterrupted flow of consciousness from the meat domain to an electromechanical domain. This will be (if it ever comes to pass) a major evolutionary shift, at least on par with the emergence of eukaryotes. Will there be hard limits to what we can do? It's way too early to tell but right now there's nothing to suggest that there absolutely must be.
I think people are often too married to their received sentimentality to not have a knee-jerk reaction and reject the possibility that a lot (most?) of what they hold dear is actually quite petty.
Like, there’s nothing that is essentially different about the world now, than it was 100, 200, 500, 1000, etc. years ago, except that physical objects have moved around a lot.
Nah, dude, 3000 years ago we didn't even have broccoli, 10k years ago we didn't have corn.
Well, you're basically saying: We're not ready to keep living because who knows, what if it doesn't work well?
Like, if we can cure aging we can probably cure all sorts of theoretical neurological disorders, and besides, I don't really see any indication that people would go insane due to an overload of memories. They'd probably just forget shit.
Everyone is just really cucked by the aging mechanism, and will defend getting 360 noscoped like it's good, actually. If we ever stop people from automatically dying, these conversations are gonna be super weird and probably extremely heartbreaking.
It might help. Now we're getting out of the realm where I feel comfortable speculating. It's easy to say that our perception of time changes as time passes, that's pretty well established. Why it happens and how that might be combated, totally beyond me.
Upon googling that term, I found an 80s comic book series, an 80s movie, and a 2019 tv show.
So not only can I not say I am a fan, I'm quite unclear what you were even asking me about lmao
It's an 80's comic book and one of the main characters gains a perspective of time that basically makes him abandon humanity. He perceives his entire life simultaneously and there's a great chapter that shows this in a neat way. You mentioned immortality changing perspective and this is the most popular piece of media in my bubble that tackles that concept.
Here's a link to the first issue if you want to read it, there's only 12.
The 2009 movie adaptation is pretty faithful and I enjoy it, but obviously the comic is better. The 2019 series is a sequel/spin-off to the comic book is pretty good, but also pretty different.
If I'm aiming for eternity but I only get a quadrillion years until the point where it's unlikely that we would be able to source enough energy to keep ourselves going, I'll probably be ready to die by then. This feels exactly like bapiro's "solar panels aren't renewable because one day the sun will go out dummy" argument.
id like to see the heat death of the universe try to dissolve our self sufficient hive-mind satellite
Appeal to "the natural order of things" in a communist community? Classy.
Apply C to life and then we're talking ;)
I don't see what your A point is addressing? Maybe you misunderstood? I was saying that the appeal to "the natural order of things" i.e.: "This strand of transhumanism is a denial of reality. The universe is winding down, long term, and there’s no getting around that." is ridiculous. Just because we have observed things to be a certain way (based on VERY limited observations anyway) and surmise things to go a certain way in the future doesn't mean that it's how things ought to be now and forever.
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
Here's something I've found comforting.
Think about what you are, and think about how you became that. Think about the things that are a part of you that you don't like. Recognize the parts of the higher You that exist in others, outside the limit of your physical self. It's cheesy to say "we're not physical beings with a spiritual experience, we're spiritual beings having a physical experience", but this does point in the direction of transcending individualism. Some religions convey this as "God in us" or "God through us".
If you want to use the psychological trick of flooding yourself to let go of attachment to the individualized form of your self, maybe try this.
read the Culture series or some summaries/breakdowns of the Culture itself if you want to see some speculative fiction of an ultra advanced communist society and how it deals with death. basically, death is optional but most humans eventually opt out. it becomes a sort of cultural norm to eventually accept death (immortality is an eccentric behavior but it puts no strain on a post-scarcity society. some people just like living forever). humans in the Culture have the option to self-terminate at any moment if desired, or mind upload. supposedly the average person chooses to live for a few centuries or so.
See also: Walkaway by Cory Doctorow and his other novels set in the Bitchin Society
ooo ty this is the first i've heard of this one!! the new kim stanley robinson sci-fi 2312 (and by extension the ends of the Mars trilogy) also play with near post-scarcity socialist society where biological immortality is within grasp
Be forewarned: Doctorow was a lolbertarian techbro around 2000ish and has since drifted towards radlib/succdem.
That said, he has released a lot of his novels and short stories with a creative commons license so you can get free ebooks (and in some cases free audiobooks).
If you like Walkaway check out Rapture of the Nerds or Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
I'd like to live for as long as I want and then merge my consciousness with some sort of gestalt hivemind
cosmism has left the chat
i’m sure they’d give people the choice though
imagine dying, then moments later your mind awakes and the words appear in you mind: ‘comrade, FALGSC has been achieved, would you like to be resurrected?’
Instantiative reincarnation gonna get you like that. Just when you think you're good & dead and BAM, some other jackass exists that copies your post-existing thought processeses so closely you instantate and they mantle you.
In most instances you wont be aware of it though, so that's nice.
Lol, the latter, but its framed as a consequence assuming #1. that quantum suicide is a real thing, and #2. The universe is infinite in time & scope.
Gave you ever heard of quantum suicide? The idea is that as long as it's possible you have some chance of surviving, in some universe you will.
Also consider a universe infinite in both space & time. Eventually if you go far enough or wait long enough, you'll meet a copy of yourself, a universal do-over. Go farther and you'll encounter every possible permutation of what could be considered "you."
Combine the two & you come to the conclusion "you" will never really die. There's enough of you you'll eventually get a do-over and the over-you will only remember universes where you don't drastically fuck up and erase possibility of you existing in some form.
There's a few where you wont lose stream of consciousness in between deaths but they're exceedingly rare.
Your pattern will keep happening over and over again, there's not enough unique in you to beat an infinite series of dice.
Please do not resurrect me.
I’m content to follow Nature through the astral plane, shattered and reincarnated into new forms, dancing in the shimmering void.
Actually... resurrect me and if it sucks just let me out again. Until then, Hellfire
You might be interested in the biocosmists, Russian revolutionaries who demanded (Izvestia, November 1922) in a manifesto that the Soviet government resurrect the dead & give everyone eternal life ("the oppressed could never reconcile themselves with the death of Lenin"). They also were tired of the earth going round the sun endlessly, "like a goat on a rope", and wanted to explore new trajectories.
