You Wanna Live Forever?

If dying sucks so much... well, what if we just didn't?

If that sounds stupid to you, that's because it kind of is. I agree that it's a ridiculous idea, but it is one that persists. In fiction, the idea of immortality has been explored to the point that there are multiple different tropes and concepts developed from the idea and its various interpretations of immortality, and I won't deny that a lot of it is really, really cool. The implications for one's physicality, psychology, philosophy, memory, morality.

But, I'm not talking about fiction. 

There are people today who not only believe in immortality, but actively seek it out, and I'm not talking about the religious people who believe in an immortal soul... I've already covered why they're wrong. No, what I'm talking about is a different kind of person - many of whom are atheist. The Word of the Day is: 'TRANSHUMANISM'

Transhumanism /trænsˈhyu mə nɪz əm/ n. A philosophy that explores human transcendence above or beyond organic, corporeal limitations through technological and philosophical evolution.

Now, transhumanism is an interesting idea. Because, as I discussed in my blog post all about logical fallacies, Appeal to Nature, "arguing that something is good, ideal, just, true or valid because it is natural" is a fallacy. It's wrong. Nature sucks, all the time. Disease is Natural; Pain is Natural; Cancer is Natural; Anger, Death, Entropy, Fear & Ignorance are all Natural.
So, transhumanists look at these and say: "yeah, all of that sucks, so why don't we work to overcome it?"

Some of this comes down to philosophy and changing the way we view the world, but a lot of it comes down to technology. That's why the philosophy is named transhumanism. The idea is that we can utilize technology - medical technology, cybernetic technology, engineering, etc. to overcome the limitations of our humanity.

So we would transcend humanity, crossing from "humanity" to a kind of "posthumanity"; either to achieve superhuman ability, superhuman longevity, or perhaps even superhuman contentment and happiness.

Again, not all transhumanists want to become cyborgs, some of this is merely a philosophical outlook that proposes that humans should strive to evolve, philosophically and culturally... but, a big part of it is involved in overcoming the physical, natural limitations of the human body, the human mind, and especially the human lifespan.

Now, I like cyborgs and transhumanist ideals towards overcoming human limitations. After all, I wear glasses, without technology I would be legally blind - I love using technology to improve the human animal. I love how we've used medicine to implant artificial joints, or offer prosthetics to those who would otherwise have fewer limbs. I also love what medication, therapy and mental health intervention has done to improve the quality of life of basically every person I know.

But, I draw the line at immortality...

Not because I don't want to live longer! If offered the opportunity for immortality, I wouldn't turn that down. But, that's the thing, isn't it? Transhumanism doesn't offer the opportunity for immortality.

For one thing, I need to make it clear, not all transhumanists seek immortality, but "superlongevity", a much longer lifespan. Current science (based around the degradation of telomeres) seems to suggest that 120 years is the hard limit on lifespan, and some transhumanists just want to achieve that, and maybe extend it a little. 200, maybe?

But, there definitely are some transhumanists who think we can live forever. But, in that case, transhumanism is debunked by my realism.

As I already covered in You Are Dying in that quote from Adam Conover, you may well be able to replace a part of your body if it starts to malfunction, but eventually you will be overcome with malfunctions as your body degrades and decays. And most importantly, you are your brain. You cannot replace your brain if your brain starts to malfunction, because you are not a "ship of theseus", there is a bit of you that is you, and it's your brain. Which is why I've never understood the idea of a head transplant.

Like, I get it, you're taking a head from one body and putting it on another. But surely, that's not a head transplant... that's a full-body transplant. If I switched your head with your dog, your dog doesn't then get "your head and brain", your dog would get your body, and you'd get their body, right?
I'm not opposed to full-body transplants in theory, although we still haven't figured out how to reattach a head to the nerves and spine of a body, so any attempts just far have really just accomplished induced paraplegia... but, if we can solve that problem, it would be fine.

Speaking of which, there are some theories that transhumanists have about cryonics. The field of cryonics is a wholeheartedly transhumanist (and radical futurist) idea that whilst we cannot overcome death and disease at the moment, in the future we will, and so if we freeze people just before (or as) they die, then in The Future we will defrost them, fix them, and they'll go on living.
And this isn't just an idea, there are companies today that you can pay to freeze your body upon death: the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the Cryonics Institute, KrioRus LLP, & The Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute—each found in America, Russia, & China, respectively—will all gladly freeze your body and store it in the hopes that someone will revive and restore you in the future, for the low-low price of... $200,000
Although, if you want to save a bit of money, you could go for neuropreservation, in which the doctors will kindly cut your head off, and store just that, so they're not wasting space storing your entire body. I mean, who needs that, right?

Now, there are a few issues I have with this. Even if we set aside for a moment that it is currently impossible to reattach a head to a body in a way that you can actually operate it... because murder is still illegal, cryonics organizations are only allowed to do this to your body (or head) after you have died.

So, this isn't just a case of hoping that people in the future can restore our bodies from aging or disease or whatever we were dying of, it's hoping that we've found a Cure for Death. Which is, in a word: Stupid.
Not only is that impossible, but I want you to imagine for a moment that we did find a cure for death... the next immediate problem would surely become overpopulation, since we would no longer have the limiting factor of death to create room for new people... so why would anyone decide to exacerbate that problem by reviving the, at minimum, 2000 persons currently slated for cryopreservation?

Now, some transhumanists have an answer for this... some transhumanists don't want to put their head back onto a human body, no, that would be silly(!) What they want is, in the future, when we learn how to upload our brains into computers, they just want to be defrosted, cured of death, and had their brains uploaded into a computer where they can either live in a virtual reality, OR have their brain uploaded into a robot body.

Now, I love the creativity of futurists, I think it's rather cute, but this is also incredibly stupid, because it is impossible to upload your mind into a computer.

Okay, you might think I'm being a little dismissive by calling it impossible, after all, so many things seem impossible, so how can I make such a claim? Well it's because of how brains work. We may not understand all of the ways that a brain works, all of the intricacies... but one thing we know for certain is that You Are Your Brain.
We have witnessed, and many people have experienced, how traumatic brain injury can affect the way we think. We know that they physical property of our brain can and will affect the psychological/mental properties of who we are, because our brain is who we are...
Or, if it helps to think of it this way, Your Mind is an Emergent Property of your Brain. The energies and signals that are You arise because of the multitude of connections of neurons in your brain and the way that they interact. Some people think of this as like a Computer and Software, and whilst that's not a terrible way of thinking about the neural connections in your head, I think a more apt way is to think about it as a River.

A river is the flow of water through the land, and whilst the river can also carve the land to reshape the topography of the land to flow a different way, if you take water from the river and place it in a cup... it is no longer "the river". it's "riverwater" sure, in the same way that if you biopsy a brain you will have "brain matter", but you won't have "a mind" in your biopsy sample. Proposing to take a mind out of a brain, makes about as much sense as taking the water out of a river. You can do it, but it won't be the river anymore. Whilst our minds aren't made of water, they are "made" of energy. Removing the energy from our brains wouldn't preserve your mind, it would destroy it.

People propose uploading their brains to computers to preserve themselves and as I've expressed, that is definitely impossible... I won't deny that a sufficiently advanced computer could scan and upload the network of your brain, but, it could only do it in the same way that a scanner does or a digital camera. You will still exist. You will still die. There will be a virtual copy of You, sure, but that isn't You... you will still die. In fact, if it accomplished this by removing the energy of your brain to do so, it would only be recycling your mental energy, not preserving it. 
Now, perhaps the radical transhumanists don't mind and for them I am grateful and I wish them all the best in their robotic evolution.

I don't want to die, I think I've made that clear, but I see all of this as nothing more than denial. No more scientific than the theists who think we'll all become ghosts.

I love this stuff in fiction, I love exploring these ideas in science fiction, because that's what they are, science fiction. But, what I don't love is seeing people delude themselves into paying exorbitant amounts of money just to keep their body on ice. I don't love people clinging to this hope that they can outlive their own lifespan, because it is physically impossible; & I definitely don't love the fact that this is just another attempt to avoid memento mori... the reminder the death is inevitable.

I have mentioned him once or twice, especially when discussing memetics, but I am something of a fan of CGP Grey. He's not perfect, he has some ideas about AI and self-driving cars that I think are misguided, but I still find his deep dives into topics interesting. But, in 2017 he put out a video called: Why Die?

You can watch it if you like, it's relatively interesting, but I can't deny that (intentional or not) it is a form of transhumanist propaganda. Also if (like me) you have Existential Death Anxiety, it can be somewhat confronting... and if you've not taken well enough care of yourself, that can make such propaganda more effective. So, consider this my trigger warning... don't watch this unless you are healthy, sober and have a critical mind. As I fear that it might just encourage people to start believing in the holy grail of immortality... and for that reason, I don't like the video.
Clearly, whether stated or not, CGP Grey is proposing transhumanist ideals and he's entitled to that, and like I said it's an interesting idea. But, my issue is that after this video, he doubled down. The next video he uploaded was an animation of a transhumanist fable:

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

I like fiction, but as something of a storywriter myself, and I could point out that the metaphor is a bit confused... since, in the story, they're not stopping death, just a dragon who eats people, they're not achieving immortality. But that's not my real issue with this story. No, the reason why I hate this story and do not encourage you to watch it is because the main point of the story appears to be:
If you try to come to terms with your Mortality, You are holding Immortality back.

I find this disgusting because yes, if we could live forever, then people who tried to see the good in death would be holding us back, and I agree with that sentiment.
However, at time of writing: IMMORTALITY IS IMPOSSIBLE!! - did everyone forget that before they wrote, illustrated, animated, composed and narrated this story?
I'd prefer to say that it will always be impossible, but I'm willing to concede that I cannot prove what the future cannot do. But this fable was written in 2005 by Nick Bostrom, and the video was created by CGP Grey in 2018.

But that being said, there is one thing that I do agree with...

Because I think it is wrong to delude yourself into believing that immortality will save us from death. I think that's nothing more than death anxiety in another form. Whilst I still don't like the fable, the idea is better expressed in the first video.
There are those who claim that death "gives life meaning", and that seeking to overcome death is "selfish and immoral", or, to quote from video itself:

"The world contains pain and death, and so your brain believes the sweet lies that the horrors you can't avoid are good for you."

—Why Die?, CGP Grey, 2017

I do not believe that the contraint of our lifespan "gives life meaning". After all, I don't think life has any meaning except that which we give it, and even if someone did believed that death gave their life meaning, that idea would die alongside them.

But this isn't just theory, there are a lot of people who believe this stuff. And if you need any proof, well, we looked at a transhumanist fable about the benefits of immortality, so why not look at how fiction shows the opposite?

As I said at the very top, when discussing immortality in fiction, there are a lot of tropes regarding it, but it is very often portrayed as Evil. Sometimes the villain strove for immortality because they were selfish, or immortality requires you to cross the line into evil, and sometimes people seek out immortality because of their own narcissism and supremacist views. Sometimes immortality itself makes you evil, as your immortality makes you cold, detached and inhuman; or perhaps the process of immortality corrupts your mind, or turns you into something inhuman. Sometimes, people portray immortality itself as more of a curse... as you are forced to watch your family, friends and loved ones die; or, you will have eternal life but not eternal youth, leading you to become unnaturally senile and frail, or perhaps your experiences will outgrow your ability to remember them, or perhaps it requires you to steal life from the living, perhaps your perhaps your immortality resurrects you after death meaning you must endure death again and again.

In all of these cases, I can't help but wonder if this is nothing more than cope. I love me a good horror story about the horrors of unageing monsters, but the prevalence of these ideas does feel like major cope. Is this nothing more than Sour Grapes because these Writers who use these tropes (who are themselves all, without exception, undeniably mortal) assume that the world is a just place, and thus the absence of immortality (or presence of mortality, I guess) must exist for good reason?

I can't say that for certain, but what I can say is this: You Cannot Escape the End.

Because at the end of the day, it is impossible. Even if we found a way to cure death and ageing, entropy is a fundamental reality of the universe, so you would suffocate and starve in space. Hell, even if we stretch the bounds of believability to the point that we have all cured death, ageing, hunger, suffocation, oxygen, the need for warmth, the need for company, everything.
Well, then the universe would still fall into heat death out from under you. You would be cold, dark and alone... forever. Surely that's worse, no?

I'm not saying that mortality is a good thing, I'm just saying it's a thing: you're going to die. You don't have to like it, but I do think you have to accept it... otherwise, the very last thing you experience is likely going to be a whole lot of horror and regret.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and I think that I would like to be immortal, but I don't expect to be. I genuinely think that it's impossible. But, so long as it's not being used for propaganda, I do think it's a fun idea to explore in fiction. For that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die...