On The Impossibility of Immortality

Suppose we discover the mechanism by which we can cyclically regenerate cells or differentiate them like the immortal jellyfish. Would you not be subject to death by 'unnatural' causes? After all, the longer you live the higher the probability of your wordly demise so that it eventually reaches 99.9%.

But let us again suppose that by some miracle you live beyond years unthinkable. Would not your 'self' die at some point? For the capacity of our brains cannot accommodate such lengths of service as conditioned by our evolutionary history and so your psychology would fail to keep hold of your memories and identities of past selves. It would be as if, like the phoenix, one is continually reborn into newer 'persons' and render the meaning of immortality null.

But let us finally suppose we somehow circumvent this process by either modifying our brain or uploading our consciousness into digital or quantum form so that it can be recalled into our psychology whenever one so wishes. Would entropy not definitively dash our hopes at true, meaningful immortality? Is that not the bane of reality waiting for us with its giant scythe at the end of time ready to disintegrate our very atoms into nothingness?

Where can one thus find immortality in this world?

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wallstreetpit.com/113170-anti-aging-pill-on-the-horizon-human-trials-this-fall/).
iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/preliminary-results-early-human-trials-anti-aging-formulas-reveal-no-adverse/
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I'm not sure anyone is arguing the case that you can

Real niggas don’t die, homeboy
They multiply

Yeah of course you'd still die once we figure out how to reverse the aging process, cure most disease and cancers. Random accidents would still be a thing and so would homicide. That doesn't mean we shouldn't get rid of the aging process anyway since that process leads to so much unavoidable suffering and pain.

>Where can one thus find immortality in this world?
accept jesus as your load and savour then enter heaven

BOOM immortality baby!

I'll take it if you throw in a harp and my own cloud in the deal.

What if you lived so long that you changed so fundementally that you were a completely different person than when you started. I am not just talking about atoms but all the things that make you you like personality and memories. Are you effectively dead?

It is pointless. Your brain is a constant churning cauldron of particles, never the same, the only continuity being the myelin sheaths and other very slowly regenerated parts of your brain cells which support rather than constitute synapses, even they change eventually.

You live for a split second and are replaced by another entity convinced it is "you".

Preserving your brain will not preserve you, only the memories in that brain.

Being purely philosophical here I think we might be at the brink of some kind of electronical revolution, where more and more is uploaded to different kinds of clouds. If, eventually, humans were able to upload themselves I don't think that's a guarantee for immortality, taking into aspect different kinds of viruses and malware that also circulates in the clouds.

Sure, we might get rid of the human body made of flesh and bones, but we will be open to new kinds of diseases, maybe even the ones now harming ourselves. So I don't think immortality by preserving ourselves is possible either.


Speaking of our brain and it's capacity it is true that it can't hold on to our true selves forever, we would probably change personalities a lot during the first few centuries, and there comes the question you still are you. We might go through a few phases of being "born again", and with that in mind I don't think the meaning of immortality is of what the major population thinks of.

We might be able to preserve our body, renewing each cell during the process, but our minds, what makes us into the different personalities we are, would change. Probably a lot too.

>Would entropy not definitively dash our hopes at true, meaningful immortality?
you gotta solve physics to get an answer to that.

as for the other stuff the most satisfying thing we're likely to come up with is having copies of yourself ready to be printed out and activated. assuming that turns out to be feasible or whatever.

>having copies of yourself ready to be printed out and activated

When would you do that? And the end of your life to continue in a new body? I don't think that can ensure that our minds stay intact as we then would need to be able to also send over our personality, made from synapses built up over the years alive.

It could be possible to enter a new body and spend some time after the transfer studying yourself to try as good as possible to continue as yourself.

That might depend on how precise the copying process is too, if it is able to capture and copy your exact brainwaves and synapses it could totally be possible in a distant future.

I dont understand the point of the OP.
Your mixing a lot of pseudo science and philosophy with real science.

You would be better off just focusing on one.

I mean periodically scanning your exact physical structure and if you die rebuilding the latest one.

course I don't know if it will ever actually be doable.

>>all this talk about copies of the human body this and uploading to computers that while various real world doctors have been working on anti-aging medications as we speak.
Why live in a computer when you can live out life here and now only without the ravages brought about by the aging process?

Apparently clinical immortality isn't enough for some people.

There hasn't been a male in my family in the past hundred years to live to the age of 70 so I will take what I can get.

Well I'm only down for this cyborg shit if I get a laser gun that I can pop out of my arm and zap motherfuckers with. Or maybe a skul-gun if I'm feeling really saucy.

I never understood humanity's fascination with immortality. I feel as if humans are meant to die and extending their lives to unbelievable levels would just create more suffering

which one is pseudo science?

Suffering is unavoidable as it is a part of our natural life, and also probable will stay a part of our life as immortals if immortality is possible then.

On the other hand think of how we could evolve, how people with burning interests in various things would be able to complete their creations and with that, possibly, take us further into future faster than we previously have imagined.

We would have all the pros and cons of this life, but without seemingly an end.

>are meant to
fuck you I do what I want
dumb fatalist

Talking about something we haven't scientifically reached I don't think there are any morals of what's allowed to mix or not. I'm not entirely sure of what you refer to as pseudoscience, but in this topic I think we need to mix up philosophy with science to reach any a greater level of debate.

I Think the subject of reaching clinical immortality is perfectly feasible and viable science.

Trying to find pure Godlike immortality barring accidents and murders is absurd.

I see, as we can save our computers to a cloud and later on reset it to a previous setting if needed?

Do you then mean that we'd only get the last one we scanned? Since scanning ourselves as an 80 year old, and if you die the next day you'd have to relive your death over and over again?

Or did you mean having a physical body of yourself from a younger state with the current mind scanned from time to time, so that if you die, you restart with a new, younger body of yourself but the same set of mind that you had when you scanned yourself the last time?

TFMW your a cyborg finally but its lame shit like having an arm with accessorizes like tooth brushes and pens built in.

Who the fuck would be using pens in the future? Toothbrushes seem dubious too if you're a cyborg with cyber teeth or some shit.

probably there's a lot of things you can mix if we ever get to that. but the most obvious is just combining it with anything that delays aging.

of course you'd also keep some earlier copies for reasons.

>Trying to find pure Godlike immortality barring accidents and murders is absurd.

Agreed.

Yes, probably clinical immortality is possible, but I don't think it will come to us in our timespan. Not entirely as what we think of as immortality. The closest we are to immortality now is being able to change used up body parts, which still is expensive and only possible for the elite in our society. To reach a complex level of immortality needs some exact, point to point, accuracy of medical expertise. We _could_ possibly transfer brains from our body to an "empty" labgrown body in our time. Then there's only one problem, no one is exactly sure of how we'd react to the transfer and the new body, considering the physical and psychological stress that transfer would put onto our brain.

I can totally see that.

One body of me as 20-something, called my bed-body, meant for sleeping with others.

One body of me where I've exercised humongously amounts, called my fight-body.
-"Hold on, let me just jump into my fighting body and then we'll solve this problem of ours."

Another body called successfull-businessman-body. This one I use whenever attending to some important meeting or other related things.

Brilliant!

>>but I don't think it will come to us in our timespan.
I disagree, anti-aging pills are being worked on as we speak.(wallstreetpit.com/113170-anti-aging-pill-on-the-horizon-human-trials-this-fall/). Once those are available our timespan will almost certainly increase drastically which will give us plenty of time for most infectious diseases and cancers to be dealt with. Now accidents and murders, those are uhhh harder. A lot harder.

no you dumbass why would you be able to just upload your mind to something else

you'd have your original scanned body and then improve its physical traits depending on how far their workings have been reverse engineered, and older ones in case it turns out to be fucked somehow. if we were at the point where the functionality of the brain is solved you could ditch all this and just start upgrading it.

A better question is: Why are so many redditurds here?
It's OP's topic (sadly) a brainlet magnet or is the board already infested?

>why would you be able to just upload your mind to something else

Because the brain functions on (kind of) electricity, then it could be possible the upload the mind.

If you've scanned you body, it has to be transmitted into somekind of file that can be built into abother body, during that process actually changes should be possible, like upgrading your immunesystem etc..

it's available in meatbits right now but that's no reason to start randomly modding it. reverse engineering how things work is just a different question.

>Now accidents and murders, those are uhhh harder. A lot harder.
Perhaps the need for crime would decrease as humans have more time to actually get somewhere in life, eventually crime would get more advanced. If this in the link gets through and accepted, everything we know about life would change and so would our moral philosophies.

Even though I don't think it will get accepted yet as an increase in NAD+ might have unknown long-time effects that we don't really know of, possibly some kind of mutation. Maybe even a resistance to it after some time that might give the opposite effect, and make our lifespans shorter.

IF it gets accepted tho, I think all food-related industries would want to get a part of this, and we'd soon find NAD+ as an ingredient in every meal.

>For the capacity of our brains cannot accommodate such lengths of service as conditioned by our evolutionary history and so your psychology would fail to keep hold of your memories and identities of past selves.

it's called "forgetting" it happens to everyone

I don't know, humans seems to have some kind of need to mod everything in our hands, so even if there's no reason people still might want to mod it. Depending on the cost then ofc

>he wants to live forever
lmao pathetic

I think Dr Who, with the Girl who lived, grabbed that concept pretty good.

Live long enough and you soon enough forget your own name, emotions too might become too cloudy and irrelevant for such a long lifespan.

>>Even though I don't think it will get accepted yet as an increase in NAD+ might have unknown long-time effects that we don't really know of, possibly some kind of mutation. Maybe even a resistance to it after some time that might give the opposite effect, and make our lifespans shorter.
It might have long-term effects, or it might not. Regardless that is just one project, there's other stuff in the works and the link I quoted was just the only one I bothered to save because it also mentioned stuff about astronauts and space exploration.


>>IF it gets accepted tho, I think all food-related industries would want to get a part of this, and we'd soon find NAD+ as an ingredient in every meal.
Yeah of course, this just goes without saying now that I think about it for a minute.

Is there a follow-up on this article tho? I noticed the date was from march 2017, so the trials should have been hold last fall. I'm really curious if this got accepted or not.

I dunno, I've been looking but haven't been able to find anything yet. Although to be fair I haven't been looking very hard.

Wait never mind, here's a thing.
>>iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/preliminary-results-early-human-trials-anti-aging-formulas-reveal-no-adverse/

Good news is no adverse side-effects shown. Bad news it's too early to tell if there are any anti-aging effects yet.

>the immortal virgin vs the chad centenarian

you are part of the infestation

>I never understood humanity's fascination with immortality
I just don't wanna die a virgin, I need more time

Get a hooker then. Easiest way.

>become biologically immortal
>first bitch you fuck gives you HIV
a-atleast im not a virgin anymore

Wear a condom.

>Would you not be subject to death by 'unnatural' causes?
Assuming cell regeneration/differentiation is the only thing we duscovered, yes.
>After all, the longer you live the higher the probability of your wordly demise so that it eventually reaches 99.9%.
This really only applies to if we extend our lives but naintain frail human forms.
>But let us again suppose that by some miracle you live beyond years unthinkable.
That's more like it.
>Would not your 'self' die at some point?
I dont remember my days as an infant notlr the insipidities of my thoughts as a tiddlar. My "self" has not died. It grew and learned. Assuming we have escapped entropy, there should no longer be a limit on what we can learn or even "create" in the god sense of the word.
>For the capacity of our brains cannot accommodate such lengths of service
Then make better ones.
>But let us finally suppose we somehow circumvent this process by either modifying our brain or uploading our consciousness into digital or quantum form so that it can be recalled into our psychology whenever one so wishes.
Way ahead of you.
>Would entropy not definitively dash our hopes at true, meaningful immortality? Is that not the bane of reality waiting for us with its giant scythe at the end of time ready to disintegrate our very atoms into nothingness?
Simply put we do not know. But we do know the universe did come to be. In some way or another. Perhaps we ought to look into that while our extended lives and super brains allow us to. It is the core impulse of all life to become god, after all, everything else just dies.
>Where can one thus find immortality in this world?
For now you cannot but contribute to the divine struggle in the hopes of progress.

>it breaks

how do you get rid of something that is unavoidable

See

With various medications and treatments that reverse the aging process? It's only unavoidable right this moment, that is now and will continue to change as time goes on.

Don't be stupid about wearing it. Most prophylactic failures are due to human error.

>If, eventually, humans were able to upload themselves I don't think that's a guarantee for immortality, taking into aspect different kinds of viruses and malware that also circulates in the clouds.
Just make a backup, bro. Two physical backups and two cloud backups are more than enough.

>Where can one thus find immortality in this world?

By signing up for it in the next. What do you think Christianity is all about? Going to church on Sundays?

This

Ayo word up to my brotha big flex aka deshawn jackson yall 'ready know how it iz