Life without other people seems miserable at worst and brain numbingly boring at best.
Sure, if you let your physiology control you, and never work to transcend it. We are much more than our bodies. We have evolved in to souls, or characters, or whatever you might call them. In the past, being social so we could can help fulfill our desires of wanting to desperately bang every same species of the opposite sex that moves is what kept us alive.
However, now, if we want indefinite life extension, we have to transcend that. We have to continue to loosen the strength of those ties as we move on toward being driven for goals that will cause us to keep us alive in this new indefinite state of affairs that is beginning to burn in us.
1.) Research up on biology.
2.) Build new people (cloning at first).
3.) Resume normal life again.
Why? Because that's what I'm used to, lol.
Thats another part of the point, if we want indefinite life extension then we are going to have to keep expanding our visions of the future and what we want outside of our boxes. If we keep letting our physiology boxes control us, those boxes with those controls that tell us to spend most of our time socializing and mating, then we are going to remain severely limited, and probably not even have enough drive to sustain the momentum needed to reach escape velocity and head for the "edges" of existence.
Im not saying socializing is bad, what Im trying to say is that this is part of the current prevailing dominating state of the worlds collective minds, and that we need to dissolve that box and live in the universe, and not let societies define the boundaries of what it means to exist. Societies are just a part of that whole.
But then wouldn't we be alienating ourselves further away from the mainstream?
Do pioneers stop for reluctance to stray from the mainstream? Do leaders and visionaries hesitate because they dont want to stray from the mainstream? We arent alienating from it, we are all leading it. Not to mention, the mainstream is more like a scattering of rivers. We are embeding this mighty indefinity river straight down the center so that they can all pour in to it from their various states of streams from around the world.
More importantly, the quest for knowledge is not an attractive pursuit for all human minds. Our goals in life are unique; and are determined by the physical and chemical structure of our brains (which are, in turn, determined by the process of evolution and our upbringing). Most humans consider life to be "preferable" to death in the same way a pot plant "prefers" life over death; we've just got more cells than them. Likewise, one could say that the enantiomers of d-methione "prefer" to be de-amylated with deoxy-phosphorylase than 1-hepta,oxy-phosphorylase. But at the end of the day, it just all boils down to physics.
Thats fine, everybody doesnt have to want to know, but I think that if informed, every body can want to know. Those that do will have a much better chance of helping us make the battle for indefinity succeed. If people dont have something to fight for, they usually dont. I dont think anybody is going to fight as hard for indefinite life extension if they just want to run a resteraunt and play basketball and socialize at parties. I dont think anybody is going to see the utility in wanting to do that for 10,000 or even 1,000, or even 200 years. However, when we educate them, and paint the big picture for them, I think we can entice more to fight harder with us. If their physiologies and minds never tell them to want the big 8, or life extension, then so be it, but we have to at least give them a chance to see and want the big picture.
Let's say that blue is life and red is death. When the feathers on a sparrow turn red, it is not considered to be "wrong" or contrary to the ideals of our philosophical systems. It's simply unrelated. The same goes for a dying pot plant. Of course, humans are group-structured animals so the same emotions don't apply towards the deaths of members of our own community; hence we tend to believe the latter has the more emotional weight than the former. Everything is under the control of physics; which is in turn under the control of the universal language of mathematics. Objectively speaking, when a human decides that his death is preferable over living, he is neither right nor wrong, nor should he be considered more cowardly or brave (albeit these are societal constructs too) than you and me. Rather, he simply "is".
Once educated, I dont think we will find many of the aptitudes in the brains around the world turning from potential aptitudes, to wanting death. I mean, aptitude, when enabled, doesnt want death, just like a feather, when not bombarded with lipofuscin, or whatever, doesnt fall off. If, we find that some minds, when informed about the big picture, dont want it, then thats fine. I would be willing to bet my life that that is not the case for most people though.
Purpose is a societal construct just like beauty. Each person's definition of purpose differs from everyone else. There is no "universal purpose" that is common to everything. People tend to share similar goals due to their common evolutionary history (ie. having more knowledge than your peers and amassing material goods often leads to happiness) so perhaps it is possible to exploit this "vulnerability" in order to lead people to adopt viewpoints that are closer to your own goals in terms of philosophy, but even this is far from universal.
Its not really a "universal purpose", its more like, "everything you could ever possibly want". Its not a societal construct, it just "is." If we can unveil a direct view from the worlds eyes, to this big picture, I think it is going to create a tremendous boost in drive to make indefinite life extension happen in time for us all.
I doubt anyone will want to live forever. The human mind is a dynamic, constantly changing thing. You might want to live forever today but how do you know you will want to live forever in 100 or 1,000 years? In the space of a few years, literally millions of thoughts will pass through your head. And all it takes is for one single suicidal thought to gain more influence over the others. Well, I guess you could re-engineer your brain to never express boredom or suicidal thoughts, but, in the long run, this would only be limiting your capabilities for free thought.
We dont want to live forever, we want to live indefinitely. If somebody wanted to die, they could choose to make that happen at any given point.
Although, if we all set our coordinates for the big 8, I think we are going to have one hell of a greater ride to experience here in this bizzarre existence than we could ever have other wise, and that is what it is all about.
