Of course.
Sure, but all of that is quite meaningless when one considers that all life is bound to inevitable extinction or annihilation in the long term.
So you believe that, even if you have a child of your own, and that child has a child, on and on and on, that eventually all will come to a “complete end” and the universe will implode on itself?
Why do you believe that? Do you have proof or evidence of this? Or are you just believing “science and physics” or something?
Do you have absolute, definitive proof that universes “begin and end”? You believe the universe is finite?
Well. I think we are more than just some genes, but genes play a big part in us.
I don’t feel immortal even if i hump allot.
I’m a woman who’s only child is ours through the adoption process. I was not able to reproduce–ergo, I’m an evolutionary dead-end. Pretty depressing thought, isn’t it?
I’m also the result of the genetic contributions coming from a long line of contributors–possibly/probably even back as far as the Neanderthals, since my predecessors are European–and that’s the thing. Genetics doesn’t start with you, since you’re the result of the intermingling of DNA coming from all the lines that led up to you. The same is true for your partner. If either you or your partner come from Melanesia, chances are your DNA contains pieces of the Denisovan DNA
In that sense, your DNA passes on–but is that you?
If i may: I consider ‘you’ to be a form, or largely an associative situation.
If all the cells weren’t following a certian plan, and people in your life that you met did this or that,
if that wasn’t the case, you’d be completely someone else.
Some people believe that “you”, at its absolute essence, is soul and spirit, which has a mind and personality.
I believe buddha taught that nature is baseless or groundless at its deepest level.
That is the philosophy of what emptiness is, and how it is a certain part of reality.
Do you feel your essence is not absolute, or knowable, or is it soul, or spirit, or is it matter?
Mind to tell me the difference between “you” and your genes?
Yes, it is very depressing. I believe that very thought pushes people into church, religion, and superstition, to believe that there is an “afterlife” and Heaven for their “good deeds”. In fact, I will go even further to say that your surrogacy of an adopted child is a psychological reaction to this deficiency.
No offense of course.
I believe so.
Do you have any brothers and sisters with children? That also maybe an “extended” form of your immortality. You may technically count as an ‘extinct’ line, but your brothers and sisters, with children, if you have them, maybe a type of “extended success”.
The real problem as I see it, is counting difference of genetics. If a parent, one of two, sees his/her children as “100% genetically the same”, then what is any difference between, say, brothers and sisters, or even cousins and second cousins?
What does it mean to have a “%” difference of genetics between people, or even between animals and plantlife?
Not all information is stored in a genetic sequence.
Some structures and information is stored in the products of genes, neurve cells and such.
These cells are made based on a blueprint, but what they do later isn’t entirely based on their genes.
The outside world plays a part in what we are aswel.
Our cells are constantly dieing and using up energy so we need to replace them with new materials,
copying old patterns over out of new materials to replenish itself.
Also once a trillion or billion cells assume a form, and interact, the interactions are not
purely genetic, but are eventualities of the genetic, and they grow in different ways which
is not entirely genetic.
An example would be, people can change their beliefs or their personalities with time.
“You”, in the west, is typically mind, which is lossed during reproduction-death cycles.
“You” as in body, continues to change and recombine itself, and it outlives the mind.
So do you then believe that any definition of “self” cannot become known at a level in that science cannot predict genetic interactions within a body?
I mean, it seems improbable with our current scientific knowledge to fully comprehend all of the genetic cooperation within a human body, including the brain and mind, at a level to “determine” any types of human characteristics, including the ‘building’ of the human body, genetically, or the ‘shaping’ of personality by the brain cells and such.
So the ‘self’ is limited by our knowledge of it? Yet, in the end, we still are a result and experience of our body/mind/cells/genetics.
That’s why I made this assumption about immortality. Even if we don’t know all of the possible relationships, the principle (of passing genetics from one generation to the next) still seems reasonable, to assume.
At what point can you, or do you, fail to know or define “yourself”?
For me it’s like using a computer. I know how to use it. But i can’t build it, or fix it, or know how it works inside.
I see my self as that pilot. He does what he can, to try to live and make progress, but doesn’t know his future or
his passed, and does not know really how his body works. I’m not a doctor, and even if i was, there’s much left to learn.
I use myself but I don’t know it. If that makes sense.
That’s sufficient, thanks.
I’d argue further anyway. I don’t think “genetics” are defined within one or two lifetimes. Rather I’d say that “life” consists of genetic trends between lifetimes. I don’t think it’s as simple as taking a human subject, particularly, and to say “this one human, and one human lifetime” is fit to describe all life. Rather, there can be genetic ‘connections’, like the unknown relationships between cells, between generation to generation. So life maybe unable to become broken down to any one individual, but, to multiple organisms, even inside and out of categories of species.
For example, I have a small wart on one of my fingers. This is a ‘fungi’ type of cell. It’s not “human”, yet is a part of my body. And therefore, its genetic composition is ingrained within me. So what are the further implications of this. Does this mean that “humanity” is also partly a fungi, or fungus, just because I contain within me a small group of fungus cells, and that different people have different types of biological and cellular compositions?
Regardless, the explanation, for life, is more complex than most can offer.
So my assertions here are based upon, necessary, simplifications of life.
A few species have genetic memory.
Their mental side becomes kinda immortal that way.
Human children can learn from their parents and then become similar to them in some ways.
Parents teach their children allot, so that is similar to genetic memory but more meticulus.
I would agree that part of us isn’t entirely mortal. But for it to stay the same forever is impossible.
It’s always changing. change is a part of a being.
Why impossible?
Consider what we’ve already seemed to accept, that genetics may ‘transcend’ any one individual. If this is true, then you may not even need to look for any “unchanging” genetic aspect of an individual, but rather of an entire group or specie. There maybe “unchanging” material, genetic material, shared between different individuals within a group.
I don’t see why it’s impossible.
In fact it makes more sense to say that there are unchanging aspects of genetics.
Consider the “human” form, genetically. We share this specie, this category, this form of human in common. And this does not change (very much), even across all peoples on earth. In this way, the genetic code responsible for “human form” is not changing, in the same way that apes, gorillas, monkeys, and chimpanzees all share genetics, which makes them into a specie, and also is responsible for them “not changing” their apelike forms.
There is similar genetic codes between many species.
Genes between you and I don’t change much.
The majority of the genes are the same.
That doesn’t make us immortal, even if we are surrounded by these same old genes for a long time.
Let me ask this then:
How long would it require you, that a specific genetic sequence, say that of a simple bacteria cell, to reproduce successfully, before you accept the possibility of immortality??
100000 years? 1000000000 years? 10^10000 years???
As old as the universe itself, presuming a beginning or end???
I believe so.
Do you have any brothers and sisters with children? That also maybe an “extended” form of your immortality. You may technically count as an ‘extinct’ line, but your brothers and sisters, with children, if you have them, maybe a type of “extended success”.
Yes, I’m one of five natural children, all of whom have children. The part of my familial DNA that’s a part of them has been passed on, but that isn’t what the OP is about, is it?
The real problem as I see it, is counting difference of genetics. If a parent, one of two, sees his/her children as “100% genetically the same”, then what is any difference between, say, brothers and sisters, or even cousins and second cousins?
What does it mean to have a “%” difference of genetics between people, or even between animals and plantlife.
First of all, to have 100% genetic duplication is to have a clone of yourself. Yet even a clone has it’s own life experiences which shape its personality–its "me-ness’ and/or individualty.
All I’m saying–or trying to say–is that there’s more to life than genetics.
I consider bacteria and fungi collectively almost immortal.
So do I.