Immortality, phisophically speaking.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

[size=85]After searching around the forum, I didn’t find any real topic about this particular subject. I hope it’s not a duplicate of a past subject I didn’t find in the search.[/size]

If immortality is achieved by an human being, wouldn’t it cease to be ?
The point is, that knowing that you can make choices, (even if it’s only a matter of environmental conditions …) this choice, is always time related.

An object is an object because it does have limit in space. However, if an object is limitless in space, it also does in time.

However, an human being can store data for a certain amount of time, and volume. However, if this volume is limitless due to the fact your are immortal, it would take an infinite amount of time to reach a memory you did, like 35605 years ago. Therefore, even if you put all your data, in a computer, it would be valueless because you will never reach or have the time to get that precise information.

Therefore, if you have to live like you’re living a current life, there is no point in being immortal because you will never put at ease your ‘satisfaction’ of seeing new things, doing new stuff, because everything will be always new. So, living one, or infinite amount of lives, wouldn’t be exactly the same ? :violence-pistoldouble:

Anybody follows ? :banana-dance:

It’s another matter knowing that you can live like 200 years. I wouldn’t be against ~ Especially if I can have the physical strength of a 20 years old boy ~!

2

A choice isnt time-related unless you can prove that thoughts occur through time and space and have material substance. So far nobody has.

3

I think what you are saying is that if our body never died, our mind would run into some issues due to its finite design.

4

But by that time he would have probably incorporated mechanical parts in our brains or/and we would have learned by then how to regenerate cells and all that good shit.

5

But in doing so, you would become a singularity and thus void your humanity.

The only issue I feel the OP missed is that of immortality itself. Indeed, how does one live forever if our universe itself (or at least this cycle) will eventually end?

6

Is this necessarily so? I think it is equally possible that in forming such a singularity through technological merger we might push our humanity to new heights, become even MORE human than we are right now. At least I don’t see how we can absolutely assume this end result is impossible.

What it means to be human includes many thing - for each of these, however, they seem to largely boil down to certain ways in which we experience, think, feel, dream, create and imagine, hope, etc. What I see as a possibility through (technological) singularity is these human experiential forms being strengthened, brought into new domains of possible action and expansion, self-encounter and freedom. While it is possible we might evolve into the Borg, it is also entirely possible we might find our humanity let loose to unparalleled growth, as the mediums in which this growth is possible (for example, new modes of communication, i.e. internet, etc) increase dramatically, as we further scientize and psychologize the ‘human being’ and draw out more of its derivations, implications, potentialities, as we overcome previous limitations that hold us back from self-actualizing.

We might not “live forever” in an absolute sense, but considering the relative time-line of human thinking-feeling experience, even living for say one million years is an unfathomable amount of time for us. Combine the stretching of this out to its furthest edge, whatever that may be, along with the notion that we might speed up our own thinking processes to give us even more experienced moments of time per “second” or whatever. Either way, I think we can conclude that immortality is practically and for pretty much all purposes indistinguishable, on a human time frame, from the grand time scales in which the universe moves, changes, ceases, whatever.

Additionally, even if we were “immortal” and could live “forever”, eventually I think we would still choose to die.

7

But could you really “die” by choosing to do so ? Because, if you are immortal, therefore even if you do not have a precise purpose “now” you always have the chance in like 250 years for example to do what you wanted to do there …

However, as the second post says, I am more interested in the issues our “finite” being could have with an “unlimited” lifespan . Because, as we are a finite being, therefore our actions are limited in nature, in space, and should be in time.

But more by the fact that even if we have mechanical and electronic pieces or components that allows us to store more data, it’s the purpose of the stored data and the organization that matters, I think.

What I mean is that if time become a null variable, as it never end, you could experience everything, an infinite amount of times, therefore, as you already did x*infinite times, wouldn’t it be like you only did once ? Like a number, with an infinite amount of decimals. It’s impossible to go over the second number if you don’t chose to deliberately broke the sequence…


An human brain, basically speaking doesn’t store the data you can “remember” but recreate memories by associating basic items together, in the order it appeared or alike in the past time.

What I meant is that a choice, is one only because you know you cannot do in a different way after. A choice would be time related because, as nobody had yet the luck to live forever, you know that you’ll die one day. You do things “now” because you know you may not be able to do them afterwards. It brings all the meaning to the choice, I think.

But as you said, of course a “choice” is an intelligible thing, therefore, infinite in it’s being. “Like an Idea”. But the moment when you choose, is important, therefore a choice wouldn’t be time related ?
Like Bergson said, an Orange was “Orange” before we even invent the word, […]. So this is one point, the second point is before I choose to buy this particularly expensive chocolate at the supermarket, wasn’t “there” before “I did”, so this choice isn’t it time-related ?

Hence :

What makes the value of a choice then ?


Psychologically speaking, choice do not exist, as pure “free will”, but yet we can make pseudo-choices, by comparing different values and data…

Once, when I was looking at a documentary, a beardy guy that was working on his “vision of immortality” said the following :

I deeply think he’s mistaking everything, because of this time-related-choice idea.

I agree with MathIsACircle’s post, by saying that being able to live forever, it will void your humanity as to be human you should be able to process choices, but (if I am right), a choice can only be made because you are doomed some day by being killed, or dying in some bed. Therefore, “pushing” humanity to a new height, as aletheia said, is meaningless, because it would be equal to create a new specie then, “humans” wouldn’t be immortal, it would be something else …

I am so messy, too many languages in my head -_-;

8

Where I disagree is with the idea what choice is impossible or meaningless if time were not a factor. The less time pressure we feel, the more free we would be to make choices without regard to temporal expediency and optimization. What would this mean? It would mean the aspect of our choices that is based on making the most of the time we have would cease - and is this ALL that our choices are based around, is this the ONLY factor under consideration when we “make choices”? No, of course not. It seems to me that in endless time we would feel a huge surge of possibility, no more pressured for time, no more “do this but no time for that”, our choices would be freed from being chained to the constraints of being made in a temporally limited manner. This would not make choices themselves meaningless, rather it would make them endlessly more meaningful.

I think eventually, if we were immortal, we would want to die because it would be the last unknown experience, or the last novelty, the final meaning to add to a life that has exhausted all other meanings. I think we resist death because we are mortal, death is inevitable, we feel our desires and values and meanings stretching out everywhere past the horizons prescribed by death’s inevitability. Absent this horizon we would spend huge amounts of time exploring these desires, values, meanings, but ultimately they would (our being finite minds in infinite time) become largely or totally exhausted.

9

We should remember that life is not inherently worth living, some lives prefer to die, for example those in extreme pain or grief. I would place the extreme ennui resultant of a finite mind experiencing “infinite time” in that category as well, the category of those beings which would actively choose death over life.

10

You started in the right place, with particulars, now move your argument down to the first principles, as the ancients did, and I mean such as Parminides, Zeno, Socrates, Plato, Euclid.

A thing has two, and only two elements, its form and the material in that form. Neither the form, nor the material in the form are then things, the parts are not equal to the whole. On a biological level every environmental acquisition system of a living organism can abstact only one element of a thing and it must supply the other element to craft something that maintains and promotes the life of the body.

So, we have material, we have boundaries to it, and by applying boundaries we make a thing, so quite correctly, there is no thing that does not have boundaries.

Now we have many types of materials, time is one. Time qua time, is not a thing, and in this wise one can see that all those top notched and over paid people looking for the beginning of time are stuck in the mental rut of being ignorant of simple language and the definition of “thing” which they started off with. They live their life in self-referential fallacies. And they really do waste quite a bit of time when their ideads are pushed on to children who are suppose to be in school to learn how to think. A real thinker today would probably at some point abandon social education so that they might some day understand what real education is.

Plato tired to get his readers to abstract these ideas through exercising their minds as they read his dialogs. The dialogs of Plato are actuall early examples of some of the best teaching material available, even today. In this wise one of my projects is supplying free audio-books of the various translations of Plato. If you want a good exercise in the ideas you are wrestling with, Parminides meant to start you to thinking about the principles of predication itself.

Free audio-books are available on the internet archive along with music, videos, book etc. I poste under johnclark8659 and am constantly working at correcting my posts. This involves modifying programs, setting up my computers, voices, macros etc and etc, auditing, very time consuming, but the only thing worth doing is seeking self improvement so that we eventually can “do our own work.”

11

MathisaCircle…

Perhaps the immortal one comes from another universe of immortals. :laughing: Perhaps he was sent here over 13 billion years ago through billions and billions of stars to gather intel to take back at the time our universe is destroyed. Do we really know what (if anything) is on the other side of our universe…or what appears when ours has disappeared? Since we can’t ever know, or can we, :-k how can we say? How did this one come into being - accident, fluke, god? The possibilities are endless and mind boggling and so also is the possibility that there is another universe - was before, is now or will be! Isn’t that immortal lucky? :laughing:

12

aresandoro wrote…

How would one’s choices or humanity be affected, whether you are an immortal human or a temporary one? The realization of death is only one way in which our life can be made more meaningful. There are humans who have no sense of their own humanity or right conduct - humans, temporary or immortal :laughing: are individuals, and as such, an immortal might guide his/her life and conduct based on a higher purpose; namely, to support and aide the lives of the temporary humans. For me, it would be no different than intuiting that inner voice and accepting who we are in life and making choices based on that. And an immortal might through the eons evolve spiritually and more humanely - not less so - all things being relative, just as a temporary human might.

If we are to make our choices simply based on being doomed to someday die, out of fear, rather than to make them ‘in the present moment’ as that’s all we have - based on enhancing human life and furthering human evolution, then we’re already doomed. For me, a human being who lives in the moment is in a sense as equally immortal as one who lives forever.

Nonsense?

13

Is it possible that one day man will be able to manipulate the laws of physics ?
I’ve always wondered that. If so, the universe being finite would cease to be a problem.

14

Yep, signing in here was the best thing I did lately. Yep.

Anyhow,

I agree.

I agree.

Therefore, wouldn’t it mean being lifeless ? As the ultimate desire, is to die, because we then “kill” all the desires that leave our life always with the cup half empty. So if you live forever, it’s like you can have everything, so there is no desire possible. When you can have everything, as you said there is no further wished experience to be done. Then, living forever, wouldn’t it be like an hell in the end ?

Because the only thing, then, that you can desire, as you said previously in your paragraph, is your own death. But death if it’s chosen, it’s not as meaningful as it would appear naturally, I guess.

Because if you know that you can choose when you die, because you don’t naturally does, it means that you already know how it’s gonna end, then, it’s pointless to read the book. Am I wrong ?

*It’s particularly complex, (therefore, the reason why I wanted to talk about that), so It takes some time for me to really reply to everything, so I read the other replies but I still have some intuitions that are sometimes contrary to what it has been said, but not time yet, to be able to write it down :blush: *

For the universe, I think that if an object is supposedly infinite in size, it also does in time, therefore the universe is a timeless/dimensionless object. Hence, I don’t see any problem in being as long as some other object that IS already Timeless.

It’s pointing on another problem here, as to know the meaning of life and the direction of one own life are 2 different things. You can know the direction of a vector because you know the coordinates of it’s origin and the coordinates of it’s end. So, unless it’s ended, the direction it’s still “blurred”, no matter what you choose, it’s the meaning of the life you had, now what you necessarily did, I think.

It’s what I said in the first post, living thousands of lives, in the end , is the same.
But we do not choose out of fear, but because we know that we are gonna die someday, not like something you know “when”.

As I said precedent, it’s like a book, if you already know the end, it’s pointless reading. If the book is endless, you’ll never reach the end, always being on your hunger, then you’ll get tired of it, I think.

I love this kind of conversations :banana-dance:

15

aresandoro…

Well, you might know how it’s going to end but you do not know how it may have ended if you chose not to die. That is the sad thing about making that kind of a choice - we think we know but we can’t because life is so full of possibilities - whether we are temporary or immortal.

As for myself, what does it matter if I know the ending of the book? The End is simply the End - what is important is everything that lies between the beginning and the End. There was a time when I read murder mysteries, that I always went to the end of the book to see ‘who did it’ :laughing: - it didn’t ruin my wanting to read the book for me. Have you ever read a book and then wanted to go to see the movie - or seen a movie and wanted to read the book?

16

What did I wrote T_T, I guess you understood, but I meant"because you don’t naturally do" … it’s not very … well written. (It’s 2:40 am here ^^;) anyway.

Yes, I saw movies after reading a book, but never the contrary :blush: . I understand the interest of knowing what is going on in the middle of the book, to imagine, experience the details, however I have to say that if I already know the mystery, everything will look like obvious. It’s like you saw the end of the drama Lost, you already know the end, so all the mysteries are pointless discovering as you already know how they are gonna be in the end. It’s what I meant.

If one day somebody told me how I am gonna die, it’s something. But deciding how and when, it’s another matter I think. (For somebody who is not, “mentally ill” , and I put it in " " because it’s another very wide subject) Of course I would be more like to live my life, like “enjoying the content before the end”, but it would be also pointless because you know it’s done, like somebody else decided for you.

So is your “free will” in the fact that you do not know when this event(death) will happen ? (I don’t mean what is free will, but the boundaries of it, I guess it’s very relevant to this immortality subject)

I have to search my words more carefully :confused:

17

aresandoro

But there is no ‘particular’ meaning to life. Each individual finds or grows into that for him/her - self through their life experiences. And wouldn’t that serve to guide them in the direction their life must go? I don’t see them as being separate entities but rather as an extension of each other - or a continuum.

For me, the direction is always seen through self-awareness and one’s purpose - and i don’t feel that that is dependent on their being an end. Purposes and meaning do change and flow into other purposes…meaning and purpose are not static - they always remain in flux.

It’s both the meaning and what you did - you can’t separate them. But ultimately it just comes down to the ‘living moment’. So it would take a lot of vision and seeing of endless possibilities to keep the continuity of the continuum #-o going. Ultimately, for me, it all comes down to the individual.

Exactly. :slight_smile: We can only really live one moment at a time…and whether we’ve lived five years or 500 years, it’s all the same - it’s life. I didn’t explain too well but I know what I mean.

If you are speaking about choosing to die now rather than later, we do make choices out of fear, very often we do - perhaps choosing to die now rather than later is simply our inability to live with each moment as it is. But it is still our choice, it is our own life. But what a waste and to the lives of others. It must take an enormous amount of courage and insight to be an immortal. :laughing:

18

Multiverse? Fine. I still don’t see how your “immortal from another universe”, if made of physical stuff, will somehow escape the inevitability of all matter eventually approaching absolute zero and condensing indefinitely into one primordial super-massive Bose-Einstein condensate. Perhaps the universe is a bunch of mobius strips. Maybe it’s a giant decapus named DFghmndbf%^&$%(%45N$#5jb346jb. I don’t see how this is relevant outside of comic relief. I hardly understand sarcasm in real life. I cannot cipher it through the internet, so forgive me if I have taken this the wrong way.

Someone said something about knowing the end of a book equating to the negation of will to live or some such balderdash proposition. Case in point: Any book of philosophy. I know when I look at the cover of the Communist Manifesto, that Marx and Engels are going to finish explaining their advocacy of communism. So I should not read it? By knowing that Marx and Engels advocate communism my purpose in reading the pamphlet is null and void? The end is not the goal. It is about the journey. I challenge you: Pick up a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov is in SIberia with Sonya. He finds God. Everyone is happy (well, most everyone). That is how the book ends but does that explain the story? Hell no, it doesn’t. In fact, he’s only in Siberia for 19 of the 656 pages. For me, the ending was the least important part of that book, and when I finish reading the books I’m reading right now, I’m probably going to read Crime and Punishment again.

19

:violence-bomb:

But I think you didn’t get the meaning of my initial post actually. I said “immortality, philosophically speaking”. I didn’t infer any physical reality in it. I do not know if the universe is infinite for sure. I made the hypothesis that it was true. But all the conversation hold on these variables. By the way there is no reality, yet, behind somebody, supposedly , immortal.

One funny thing, when I ask somebody, if they would enjoy being immortal they always says “it would be sad, because I will see all my friends die, and not me”.

What ? ‘_’ It’s fun how people think only about themselves ^^:

I didn’t say that knowing the last pages of the book ruin the end, but I do not think that there would be a very nice “experience” by knowing that you are doomed. People who have painless lethal cancers, they know they will die in xx months. They will enjoy their lives, but not as you do, because they know now, that they have an expiration date, that they cannot do anything to change.

So, I continue to affirm that knowing the date, when, therefore, how, it will happen, ruin everything.

20

MathIsACircle wrote:

:slight_smile: That wasn’t sarcasm…I was just allowing my stream of consciousness to flow. More like science fiction to me. Did you even take note of the laughing smilies? I don’t believe there are immortals nor do I believe there are alien species hovering around somewhere. And supposing that there was an immortal or alien #-o capable of experiencing and surviving the destruction of Earth, perhaps he is made of matter ‘alien’ to human life and all other life here on Earth…so he would probably survive and move on. Perhaps he is composed of sheer energetic spirit and his body is an illusion, a facade. And wouldn’t the fact that he was a human who somehow morphed into an immortal automatically change him at a cellular level and beyond though he might still look human? Okay, that’s enough of that but I wanted to respond to your question.

That wasn’t me. I was the one who after knowing the ending, still read the book. I was the one who after seeing an extremely interesting movie, at times would like to read the book. I find that our imaginations are so much more when reading…somehow the movie does not always equal the experience and enjoyment which books give. And at times there is much left out of the movie that is within the book. I suppose there are people who would go on a trip (vacation) to some beautiful resort and would not want to return again. There are others who would because they realize how very much they missed the first time. It’s like any work of art - each time, threre is more to see - more appears than you saw before. I have a feeling that when you pick up Crime and Punishment again, you will see things you missed the first time - probably because you are changed, supposedly. Enjoy reading it.

I also read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment more than a few years ago - I absolutely loved the book and a few others by him. I agree with you that the ending of the book is the least part of it - the whole journey within the pages is the most important but we humans must have our endings in order to be satisfied, I suppose.