If you were immortal would you be happier?

[questionposter]

I don't think you're quite understanding what Phi for All was getting at. It's not so much that knowledge and acquired human experience causes aging (in the direct sense), more that it changes how we interact with our environment and respond to various situations. Whereas once you were young and reckless (I still am), later in life you tend to become more cautious and reserved. These traits are things that we associate with the general 'old(er) age' stereotype. As well, and as Phi said, the changes in the way we act within our world indirectly lead to physical changes; we become less active, so we tend to gain weight as we reach old age, etc., etc.

 

What if you know how to work out more extensively? Or what if you know that working out and doing puzzles reduces the age that things degrade? And have you met more than 1 o2 r old people? There's many who are definitely not just "reserved" and "cautious". I ran into an elderly person in the South who not that later after I met him said "I hate Lincoln...".

Edited November 8, 2011 by questionposter

[kitkat]

I agree with questionposter and if I could be immortal, I would like my body to be that of someone in their twenties and remain that way while my mind can still accumulate all my experiences through time and still remember it well.

[Phi for All]

I don't think you're quite understanding what Phi for All was getting at. It's not so much that knowledge and acquired human experience causes aging (in the direct sense), more that it changes how we interact with our environment and respond to various situations. Whereas once you were young and reckless (I still am), later in life you tend to become more cautious and reserved. These traits are things that we associate with the general 'old(er) age' stereotype. As well, and as Phi said, the changes in the way we act within our world indirectly lead to physical changes; we become less active, so we tend to gain weight as we reach old age, etc., etc.

It's not so much about caution and reserve. It's more like you've been there, done that, and now know how to do it better with less resources. Even if we had a regenerative ability that caused our cells to be replaced with fresh new copies, and could regenerate teeth and lost digits and limbs, with accumulated knowledge one becomes more economical in their movements and the way you deal with the world. You learn to be less scattered. You don't run around needlessly expending energy because you've learned you may need that energy for something else later.

 

It's not about being reserved. It's about working smart instead of hard. Instead of grabbing the 80 pound bag of dog food off the floor at PetsMart, hefting it up and walking it over to your cart like you did when you were 20, the older/wiser you might push your cart up closer and slide off the bag that's closest to the height of the cart. Not because you're not as strong, but because you're smarter. And maybe you don't have as much to prove by showing off your strength.

 

I think wisdom and experience is going to temper the way you interact physically with the world. I'm not sure it would continue to increase as you got older. It's interesting to think about. Would a thousand year old person in a twenty year old body pick up some really great ways to work smarter, not harder? Seems inevitable.

 

What if you know how to work out more extensively? Or what if you know that working out and doing puzzles reduces the age that things degrade? And have you met more than 1 o2 r old people? There's many who are definitely not just "reserved" and "cautious". I ran into an elderly person in the South who not that later after I met him said "I hate Lincoln...".

Again, if we can regenerate, we could always work out as much and as strenuously as we want. I'm not talking about capability or about caution so much as wisdom. Some risks aren't worth the effort and you know that after you've taken enough of them. And if your mind stays sharp but you just keep on accumulating knowledge and experience, you could get to a point where it would greatly affect the way you approach many situations.

 

I agree with questionposter and if I could be immortal, I would like my body to be that of someone in their twenties and remain that way while my mind can still accumulate all my experiences through time and still remember it well.

I think we've established that this is going to be our definition of immortal. Young adult bodies that regenerate all tissue, limb replacement instead of scarring and complete teeth regeneration throughout your life. Decapitation or severe brain trauma is the only way we could die. This would allow your mind to develop unchecked by aging or disease.

 

Edit: I know we're being wishful, but let's also be realistic. The regenerative ability wouldn't be rapid, occurring right before our eyes like in the movies. More like a salamander in real life. So you'd probably take more risks than you would at present, tempered with the thought that too much risk might take you out of commission for a few weeks. Few would take that prospect lightly.

 

I wonder, would the smaller, more understandable threat of being laid up for a few weeks be taken more seriously than the more mortal threats we tend to deny in our present state?

[Prolific]

You have to think though, the fact that we aren't going to live forever doesn't always make us sad. Only on a rare occasion when I think about death do I become sad because of it, but then I get over it because it's just a natural part of life. If we were immortal we'd still feel emotion, if anything we'd be more prone to feeling sad because of our prolonged life. Say the average person becomes sad once a month over something completely unrelated to the thought of death. The immortal person will have been sad the same amount of times in the first 90 years of his life, as the normal person dies the immortal one continues to be sad once a month. I kind of accept death, I think it would be insane being immortal. If I had the choice I wouldn't. The thought of being alive forever, outliving all the friends you ever make, then meeting new ones only to have them die on you again. You'd be very wise and articulate no doubt about it, but all your wisdom would only be applicable in relation to this Earth. If the whole human race was immortal then it wouldn't be very special at all, in which case we'd take it for granted and get sad about random shit anyways, just because we're human beings and our brains are controlled by chemistry, and happiness is really just dopamine being released into our brain. Just because we're immortal doesn't mean we're immune to having a low dose of dopamine on the rare occasion.

Edited November 16, 2011 by Prolific

[hypervalent_iodine]

I've been meaning to reply to this.

 

It's not so much about caution and reserve. It's more like you've been there, done that, and now know how to do it better with less resources. Even if we had a regenerative ability that caused our cells to be replaced with fresh new copies, and could regenerate teeth and lost digits and limbs, with accumulated knowledge one becomes more economical in their movements and the way you deal with the world. You learn to be less scattered. You don't run around needlessly expending energy because you've learned you may need that energy for something else later.

 

I think, to a point, we are arguing the same thing. That being said, I don't necessarily agree with what you've said here. Though certainly, the 'work smarter, not harder' adage has some major role in the way our interactions mature, I think you are perhaps overlooking the propensity for people to act recklessly for the purposes of showing off, whether that be implicitly or explicitly. I derived my initial argument based on that context.

 

It's not about being reserved. It's about working smart instead of hard. Instead of grabbing the 80 pound bag of dog food off the floor at PetsMart, hefting it up and walking it over to your cart like you did when you were 20, the older/wiser you might push your cart up closer and slide off the bag that's closest to the height of the cart. Not because you're not as strong, but because you're smarter. And maybe you don't have as much to prove by showing off your strength.

 

I think it may have more to do with your last point than simply working smarter. Even to a 20 year old, it would seem obvious that taking the trolly up to the bag rather than taking the bag to the trolly would be the optimal way to do things.

 

I think wisdom and experience is going to temper the way you interact physically with the world. I'm not sure it would continue to increase as you got older. It's interesting to think about. Would a thousand year old person in a twenty year old body pick up some really great ways to work smarter, not harder? Seems inevitable.

 

Agreed.

 

As an aside, I realise my last post could be taken as putting words into your virtual mouth. Apologies for that.

[THoR]

If you were immortal (unable to die), your corpse (that thing you wear) would have only a handful of cells and you would likely be crawling around in the primordial sludge at the bottom of some stinking volcanic gas vent at the bottom of the ocean. Evolution would have passed you by.

 

Now - Aren't you happy that you're mortal?

[imatfaal]

If you were immortal (unable to die), your corpse (that thing you wear) would have only a handful of cells and you would likely be crawling around in the primordial sludge at the bottom of some stinking volcanic gas vent at the bottom of the ocean. Evolution would have passed you by.

 

Now - Aren't you happy that you're mortal?

Nope that's because my parents, grandparents (and so on back to the primeordial soup) were mortal and reproduced and evolved - nowt to do with me; there is always a first.

[fractalres]

I'm sure I'd need to use viruses designed to genetically modify eukaryotes (incorporating signal transduction to keep their activity at a pace I could survive) to compensate for neural limitations. Although unpleasant experience would be diluted in a safe society with plentya room and cybernetic labor, so many associations would otherwise induce waking dreams, causing noochemical insufficiency and neurotransmitter cascades.

[THoR]

I'm sure I'd need to use viruses designed to genetically modify eukaryotes (incorporating signal transduction to keep their activity at a pace I could survive) to compensate for neural limitations. Although unpleasant experience would be diluted in a safe society with plentya room and cybernetic labor, so many associations would otherwise induce waking dreams, causing noochemical insufficiency and neurotransmitter cascades.

Doncha just HATE it when that happens?

[A Curious Kid]

I would think that if everyone was immortal then everything would be slowed down. To me death is a motivation to live my life to the potential, if this was taken away from me I would probably be on my couch playing games rather than studying and developing into the person who I am now. Also, if you lived for eternity wouldn't live become dull? You would have travelled around the globe, maybe even into space, but in the end what will you do to entertain yourself? As my favourite television character (The Doctor) said "You make all of space and time your backyard and what do you have? A backyard."

[questionposter]

I could see living for a good long while, but I couldn't do it forever, I'd eventually just get tired of everything.

[Xittenn]

Was this a funny way of saying that it would become repetitious?

[Joatmon]

The idea gets more attractive the older you get.

[immortal]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality

 

From what I have read about immortality, religious scholars say that one needs to be omniscient in order to achieve physical immortality. Being omniscient means you know everything that is there to know so it means you'll feel disassociation and won't be interested in anything. They say that they can see things from their legs and hear things from their eyes, I don't know what that means but definitely the senses and the information content is operating quite differently in such individuals.

 

So yes if such a true immortality is achievable then it has many benefits, your mind comes to a state of complete calmness, having to think only when it is necessary rather than always thinking about this or that or what to do and what not to.

 

The idea gets more attractive the older you get.

 

When I was young I was really attracted by the idea of telomeres which are at the ends of chromosomes and prevent non-germ lines to proliferate indefinitely but an enzyme called telomerase is able to control the length of telomeres and there by making it express itself in non-germ line cells we can increase our life expectancy but it comes at an expense we would be more vulnerable to cancer attacks.

 

http://www.viewzone.com/aging.html

[questionposter]

Was this a funny way of saying that it would become repetitious?

 

Not necessarily, but more like a feeling of that I've done enough, I don't really need to be around for anything anymore, maybe tired of working too.

[Xittenn]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality

 

From what I have read about immortality, religious scholars say that one needs to be omniscient in order to achieve physical immortality. Being omniscient means you know everything that is there to know so it means you'll feel disassociation and won't be interested in anything. They say that they can see things from their legs and hear things from their eyes, I don't know what that means but definitely the senses and the information content is operating quite differently in such individuals.

 

So yes if such a true immortality is achievable then it has many benefits, your mind comes to a state of complete calmness, having to think only when it is necessary rather than always thinking about this or that or what to do and what not to.

 

 

I often have dreams that I am like a time traveler, sort of like a linked set of lives or past life phenomena, but I see the future lives as well. In one of the dreams I've had, it would have been my last life, I was thrown out of a plane into the desert. I bounced off the sand and I came out of my body and looked at myself as I lied on the ground dead. Then I sort of went back into my body but I was like a sphere of energy still dissociated from the body. It was at the bounds of this sphere of energy that I could see, and not from my eyes. I laid there for fifty years doing nothing . . . .

 

I've had other such experiences in waking dreams. I was meditating once and I dropped into a dream state. My head started to fill with the sounds of a thousand horns. My energy dissociated from my body as this beam of light entered my mouth, my eyes, and my ears. I could see from the boundaries of my energy cloud and I looked down on myself as the beam--it was like blue plasma, with black, and white entities swimming in the stream--made my body flop around on my bed, like a flag in the wind.

Edited April 15, 2012 by Xittenn

[immortal]

I often have dreams that I am like a time traveler, sort of like a linked set of lives or past life phenomena, but I see the future lives as well. In one of the dreams I've had, it would have been my last life, I was thrown out of a plane into the desert. I bounced off the sand and I came out of my body and looked at myself as I lied on the ground dead. Then I sort of went back into my body but I was like a sphere of energy still dissociated from the body. It was at the bounds of this sphere of energy that I could see, and not from my eyes. I laid there for fifty years doing nothing . . . .

 

I've had other such experiences in waking dreams. I was meditating once and I dropped into a dream state. My head started to fill with the sounds of a thousand horns. My energy dissociated from my body as this beam of light entered my mouth, my eyes, and my ears. I could see from the boundaries of my energy cloud and I looked down on myself as the beam--it was like blue plasma, with black, and white entities swimming in the stream--made my body flop around on my bed, like a flag in the wind.

 

We need Sigmund Freud to interpret your dreams. Religious experiences are neither dreams nor waking dreams, it requires divine intervention to access some real useful knowledge.

[questionposter]

We need Sigmund Freud to interpret your dreams. Religious experiences are neither dreams nor waking dreams, it requires divine intervention to access some real useful knowledge.

 

Well, your immortal, so...how do you feel about being immortal? Do you hate it?

[immortal]

Well, your immortal, so...how do you feel about being immortal? Do you hate it?

 

Taking that as a hypothetical question, there are two ways of being immortal, one is technological immortality and the other is religious physical immortality, in the latter one you won't be aware of your body and you'll show disinterest in everything, I like both kinds of immortality and no, I don't hate it.

[questionposter]

Taking that as a hypothetical question, there are two ways of being immortal, one is technological immortality and the other is religious physical immortality, in the latter one you won't be aware of your body and you'll show disinterest in everything, I like both kinds of immortality and no, I don't hate it.

 

Oh, sorry, I thought you were immortal...

[immortal]

Oh, sorry, I thought you were immortal...

From the perspective of religion everyone is immortal.

[sheldysheldon]

Yea were all immortals playing a video game called life and death for fun because we are so darned bored. It’s amazing and feels so real. little pig goes weeeeeee.

 

 

[Glossy]

A concept that Fogo's cartoon touches upon is that immortality would essentially remove all drive and purpose from our lives. Humans fear the idea of death because it would be impossible for a creature that did not fear death to remain in the human gene pool for any reasonable amount of time. Avoiding death is one of our most primal (if not our only) drives. Therefore a huge amount of our instincts are based around motivating us to eat, sleep, drink and any other practices necessary for sustaining our own lives. I wonder; if we were to attain immortality, that is, if we were able to comfortably survive without needing to eat, drink, et cetera; would we still feel the need to? Further more, would we feel 'comfortable' if we refrained from eating, drinking, et cetera? We have evolved knowing that death is a high probability, and that it should be avoided. Mentally, would we be able to cope with the confusion of no longer needing our base instincts? Would we still have the purpose in life that we have today? Surely our ultimate goal is to prolong our life, yet if we became immortal; our ultimate goal would become pointless.

Edited April 25, 2012 by Glossy

[radioactive cookie]

I like to think that I would be happier being immortal or at least being able to live for a very long period of time. I fear death and becoming old, and I fear the thought of no longer being productive or being able to contribute to society.

 

I'm really, really interested in the future, and I would love to live and see the day when science and technology start advancing to levels that we now think of as science fiction. If I were immortal or able to live for a vast period of time, I could get so much more done and help contribute more to our advancement. I fear anything that could hinder my development or stop me from learning. I really do hope that scientists will find a way to prolong life before my lifetime is up.

[Stuart]

Being trapped In this reality unable to ever find out what comes after, eventually you will see it as a prison.