Created: February 23, 2020
Modified: January 24, 2022
Modified: January 24, 2022
immortality is bad
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- The Eliezer Yudkowsky school of thought is that immortality is possible, and obviously desirable; any other position is learned helplessness.
- My strong opinion weakly held is that immortality would likely be dystopic, certainly if we achieve it any time soon. Why?
- Personally, I don't wish for immortality. The universality of suffering implies that for many people, death is ultimately positive. (though this doesn't directly imply that death is good for global utility, since death also enables new people to be born).
- Note that most of the arguments here do not apply (or don't apply as strongly) to just extending life by a factor of two, say, which seems like a more plausible outcome for current anti-aging research.
- It's important to distinguish between physical immortality---where all diseases are cured and eternal youth is available to our physical bodies---vs mind-uploading immortality. Physical immortality seems much worse. It creates enormous risk-aversion, since any deadly or crippling accident has effectively infinite cost. And yet, lives still take place in the physical world, bound by resource constraints.
- I am more open to mind-uploading immortality, if it becomes possible. There, experience is arbitrary. Assuming the system is good enough, almost any hedonic objection can be overcome by changing the software appropriately. I am very skeptical that we will get whole-brain simulations working within the next century, and even somewhat skeptical that they can work at all. Brain uploading seems nice if we can create a sufficiently good simulator of the world, but all models are wrong; purely at a computational level the simulator will have to take shortcuts. And then there are the philosophical issues: from the outside it would be hard to trust that identity is continued in the uploading. But mostly my arguments are against physical immortality.
- resource constraints. adults living forever imply:
- no children: a dystopia. As in Children of men: we need children to teach, to mentor, to give us purpose, to remind us of how fundamentally delightful life can be. Maybe we could replace some of this with dogs (are the dogs also immortal tho?) and new social customs, or AI children (what's the point though?) but that's not going to be an easy lift.
- the conceptual progression of society is frozen: no youth to resynthesize knowledge and create new concepts, new art, new social movements, new scientific insights. Experienced creators have great advantages, but they are also inherently limited; experience weighs them down.
- risk aversion: as pointed out above, no one would go skiing any more.
- the transition: who gets the immortality treatments? massive strife.
- Buddhists understand that the key to enlightenment is to rid yourself of craving. The reward is that you lose immortality: you stop being reborn and experiencing suffering. Like all ancient wisdom, Buddhism is highly contingent on the circumstances in which it developed---perhaps a future utopia could be genuinely positive-utility---but achieving that is a hell of a lot harder than developing medical immortality.
- A corollary is that anti-aging research that might plausibly lead to immortality is, inherently, bad. However this may not have much practical import. In my view the utopian world would be one in which everyone lives with a young, perfectly healthy mind and body until age X, where perhaps X > 100 (maybe 200? 300?), and then dies painlessly and predictably, yet unavoidably, in their sleep. If anti-aging research allows my parents, or me, or my kids, to stay youthful and physically vibrant until they die at age 100, that'd be pretty good.