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Emortalist Practice


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#1 till

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Posted 07 November 2008 - 09:24 PM


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Over the next few weeks I'll make available the contents of the book in this topic. The chapters, all except for the one about space-migration, are fairly small, and so should fite nicely into the context of a post. Those that don't will be broken up.

If you want to know what the book's all about, just read on. The chapters will be placed here as they appear in the book itself. This placement is eclectic, but, believe it or not, there is a thread of sorts.

Comments are welcome, but I would appreciate it if they stayed on-topic and didn't go off on bizarre tangents, as forum comments are often wont to do.

Thanks for that, and happy reading.
Till

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time—well, actually it was in the middle of the 20th century C.E.—in what then was ‘West’-Germany, a boy was born. His parents, following an inexplicable whim, gave him a ‘first’ name of some significance; a name that, when the boy years later emigrated into English-speaking regions of the world, assumed strange significance.
The boy’s family were artists. He grew up surrounded by books. TV was a long way off, and when it came it was rationed because it was, of course, the tool of the devil. Not in a religious sense, because there were no overt religious beliefs in the family, but because it was considered a tool the destruction of culture as it was known. Which it was, though the worst testimony to its community-destructiveness was in evidence only years later, in a small fishing village in the north of Spain, where the family went on a yearly basis.
At the age of six(-ish)—precise details are lost in the fog of memory, though the substance is accurate—the boy had an experience that would change his life forever. One night, lying on his bed in the dark, he thought about himself dying. And, young though he was, he was gifted—or cursed—with sufficient imagination to at least have an inkling of what it might mean not to be anymore. And he really, really didn’t like it. And he cried, and his mother came, but her consolations were worse than inadequate. She told him that it was nothing to worry about, That it was all right. That one day he would understand that it was all right. That, in any case, it wouldn’t happen to him for a long, long time.
Unconsoled, the boy finally went to sleep, and when he woke up the world didn’t look so bad any more. But from that day on, the thought of death was going to be a presence in his life, and though it might have been almost forgotten in the events of the light of day, it revisited him during the night, as it does to all of us, when we’re set upon by our most dreaded notions—when the night is darkest and dawn is just around the corner.
Life was never the same after horrible insight. The boy had looked his personal extinction in the face, and had seen it for what it was. The end of thought. The end of feeling. The end of hope. The end of everything. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Still, life went on. There was school, then high-school. There were the pressures of growing , with all its complexities and pitfalls, its glories and humiliations, its victories and disappointments, leaving little time for careful consideration of the knowledge lurking somewhere just below the threshold of awareness.
Still, if only he had understood himself better, he would have noticed the signs; would have related much of what he did and thought and felt to what he had known since that night. Would have understood his almost compulsive obsession with the future, which inevitably led him, a voracious reader, to science-fiction. In those days, in Germany, there were a number of really badly written pulp sci-fi series, that came out in weekly installments. He read them all, spending almost all his pocket money on this kind of stuff; much to the chagrin of his parents, who had inherited a tradition of reading, but of a somewhat classier kind, and who considered pulp magazines to be unhealthy literature.
Of course, he also read other things, among them the imaginative travel adventures of the German writer Karl May; but when he came to the end of his teens, science-fiction definitely outweighed all his other readings by a large factor. Plus crime fiction and Westerns; not all pulp, because his parents had an extensive library of paperbacks of all sorts of genres.
A significant portion of the youth’s pulp literature was contributed by a science fiction series called Perry Rhodan. It was the story of an astronaut who went to the moon, there came upon the stranded spaceship of a human-like race of aliens. Five hundred volumes later—that’s one volume per week, 52 weeks per year, and so we’re talking about a period of about ten years here!—Perry Rhodan ruled over a large human ‘empire’ (well, it was a German series after all!) and had just returned from the galaxy M87, where he had battled yet another threat to mankind. You get the drift, yes? If you want to get a notion of the spirit of Perry Rhodan: Der Erbe Des Universums (‘Perry Rhodan: Heir to the Universe’), go and get yourself from Amazon.com a CD with music (same title) by Christopher Franke, who also did the soundtrack for that amazing TV series Babylon 5. Perry Rhodan is still alive and well in Germany, though the weekly pulps are history now. The first editions are probably worth a mint.
A hero of Perry Rhodan’s scope can hardly survive what eventually amounted to over thousand volumes by living to eighty and becoming progressively geriatric and decrepit. So, the writers early-on introduced a way of avoiding aging, using a method called a Zelldusche, which translates into ‘cell shower’; a notion that, 40+ year on still has elements of definite interest. Said method of prolonging life was provided by an alien species, a kind of super-being; and was initially provided as periodic treatments and then by using a device called a Zellaktivator (‘Cell Activator;) issued in limited numbers, meaning that someone actually had to decide who was going to benefit from it. Very undemocratic, but what can you do if there’s only a dozen or so of these things to go around? It was the elite, of course, who got it, and they ruled humanity benevolently and wisely and all that, and defended it against the threats from evil aliens, who wanted to dominate the galaxies of the universe. And maybe it should be mentioned that not all of the elite were human. Undemocratic: yes. Speciesist: no.
Think about it: 500+ pulp magazines, provided on a weekly basis, in which the notion of immortality being possible…that’s certainly an excellent way of keeping the notion in the forefront of one’s mind. It wasn’t deliberate, but it happened.
Among the youth’s plans for life—with no notion as to how to ever implement them—was to go to Mars one day. But with Astronaut-dom not really feasible, he decided to study astrophysics instead. He did, for a year and a half, before life prompted him to quit university and emigrate to the opposite side of the world, to Australia. There followed more traveling, across South and Central America, a return to university to study more physics, but with a more biological theme. Years later there was marriage and two daughters, more moving around the world with ‘the job’, eventual settlement in New Zealand and, even later, re-settlement in Australia.
When he first left Germany, the youth, now past his teens, took up writing. Short stories to begin with. ‘Imaginative’ stuff mainly, with science-fiction and related genres featuring prominently. Changing languages was a bit of a bother and writing was clumsy and stilted for many years. After much groping and attempts at coming to grips with telling stories, finally there was a novel called Keaen, which a publisher bought and, after long delays, it finally saw the light of day (and Amazon.com). Four sequels followed, and the series, set on a planet called ‘Tethys’, isn’t finished yet. There also are novels unrelated to the series, plus occasional screenplays.
The whole ‘fiction’ thing probably came about because at one stage the now-man decided that it was pointless to try and persuade people of anything by writing non-fiction. Besides, he found out that, having put the initial language issues to rest, he was damn good at story-telling. The only people he actually looks up to, are story tellers; led on by Jack Vance and, more importantly in relation to the ‘immortality’ thing, Robert Heinlein; who qualifies as a ‘prophet’ of sorts, with Time Enough for Love being the closest thing to a reference book on the subject.
‘Immortality’ as a kind of subtext to life and motivation was a constant companion, but it never became explicit until sometime in late 1973, when the man picked up a book, written by Alan Harrington, called The Immortalist. Next to the night-time revelation that had came to the six-year old, reading The Immortalist qualifies as probably the most significant ‘wake-up’ event in the man’s life. It was an “Of Course!”-book, if ever there was one. And it was then that he became an avowed, unapologetic, though clandestine, immortalist.
‘Clandestine’, because the 1970s and the years that followed were a time when those inclining in similar directions were ‘fringe’ and, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain strange, to the point of freakish and weird. Earnest, yes, but strange for the most part nonetheless. The main reason for this was that achieving immortality—meaning an indefinite lifespan—appeared quite impractical from a scientific point of view. A lot of critical research was yet to be done and technology to be developed, especially on the information-processing front. Therefore, those wanting to live forever were almost forced to consider alternatives qualifying as either ‘spiritual’ or seriously-fringe-science. This means that the field attracted weirdos like rotten meat attracts flies; and it was prudent not to let on that one had similar predilections. Besides, despite Harrington’s enthusiasm, the only real prospect on the immortality front was cryonics, whose utility is at the very least dubious. Meaning that the prospects for this becoming ‘real’ were dim.
Public reaction being what it was, if the topic came up at all, it was also prudent to at least dissemble and make any immortalist aspirations into something that could be passed off as a joke or an aspect of one’s personal quirks, but nothing too serious; because if ‘serious’ it appeared, that might seriously threaten not just one’s social environment, but also the professional one. Because the man had a family to feed, certain things just were left unsaid.
Thirty-five years later, they need not be left unsaid anymore. Science and technology are on the brink of allowing even those in their 50s and healthy to achieve ‘escape velocity’. The subject of ‘immortality’ has become a target of concern and often scornful vituperation at the highest levels of governmental and religious organizations. Private organizations promoting longevity have sprung up like weeds and are flourishing, even though most of those not blatantly commercial and often peddling snake-oil still lack the skills and savvy to do really serious promotion where it is needed. The Web is riddled with people interested in the subject, as well as related ones, like ‘transhumanism’. Serious longevity and even ‘immortality’ are becoming staple fare of, unfortunately mostly sensationalist, ‘news’ reporting. The subject is ‘out there’ and has come into its own—with all the attendant problems of an enterprise that will, ultimately and if the species doesn’t destroy itself, change literally everything.
The once-six-year-old watches it all with wary circumspection; for, after thirty five years as a ‘conscious immortalist’—or, as he prefers, a conscious ‘emortalist’—and more than fifty years of being an Emortalist at least in spirit, he is afraid that the enterprise might yet fail, if only because of the myopia and blinkeredness of many of those in the immortalist movement; who should know better, but don’t seem to be able to look at things from what one might think of as an ‘emortalist perspective’.
To fail to achieve, or at the very least to delay unnecessarily, what is already within our grasp, because of these deficiencies, would be a tragedy. And so the man decided to put fiction writing to one side for a little while, and instead to pen this monograph.

END OF CHAPTER

(more in a few days...)

#2 brokenportal

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Posted 07 November 2008 - 09:37 PM

Nice, books like these are gold to the memedom. This sounds a lot like me and I know a lot of others around here will relate.

I hate it when that snake bastard death slithers into my thoughts at night too and taunts me with the impending hell of obliteration.

I also think that the part about delay being tragedy is an important topic. Together our efforts forge the tools that will slay the reaper in our life times. Divided we obliterate.

#3 till

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Posted 07 November 2008 - 10:08 PM

Thanks, but I think you'd better wait until you read on. 30+ years of living with Emortalism has resulted in things thought of aren't going to please some people. I'll get back to that somewhat further in the book.

From the back cover:

With significant human life extension just around
the corner, the world is utterly unprepared for the
changes that are about to come upon us.

This book is a personal statement, of what it may
mean to be an Emortalist, of the responsibilities
attendant with being one. Change always comes
at a price, and the more significant the change the
higher that price.

Our species will never reach the distant future if we
we aren’t prepared to pay the price; if we don’t take
care of the immediate future first.

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#4 brokenportal

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Posted 08 November 2008 - 12:23 AM

Are you saying pretty much that we should clean up the earth and poverty and stuff before we worry so much about life extension?

Well one things for sure, we wont be able to help clean stuff up and help solve other problems when we are dead.

Not to mention the continuous death of our knowledged and experienced problem solvers doesnt help things any, and the world doesnt need to spend all their time creating life extension. We can and do work on all these other problems right along with it. There are even entire life extension organizations working to organize them more efficiently, like the lifeboat foundation for example.

If helping to make the world a better place is the price I have to pay as a person with an Indefinite Healthy Life Extension then I will gladly pay that price. Hell Ill pay it twice, hell Ill dedicate my whole life to it, because thats what life is about isnt it? Continuously enabling a better future for yourself and others.

Not to mention, as I heard Aubrey outline somewhere, man kind is always going through times of great change, and people are always saying that we wont be able to handle them. Like the onset of the industrial revolution, the sex revolution, the technological revolution, etc...

Thanks, but I think you'd better wait until you read on. 30+ years of living with Emortalism has resulted in things thought of aren't going to please some people. I'll get back to that somewhat further in the book.

From the back cover:

With significant human life extension just around
the corner, the world is utterly unprepared for the
changes that are about to come upon us.

This book is a personal statement, of what it may
mean to be an Emortalist, of the responsibilities
attendant with being one. Change always comes
at a price, and the more significant the change the
higher that price.

Our species will never reach the distant future if we
we aren’t prepared to pay the price; if we don’t take
care of the immediate future first.



#5 niner

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Posted 08 November 2008 - 04:41 AM

What's with the spelling? Emortalist? Does that have some special meaning, or is it just a typo?

#6 till

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Posted 08 November 2008 - 05:22 AM

Are you saying pretty much that we should clean up the earth and poverty and stuff before we worry so much about life extension?


Ah, no; not at all.

Look, there's no point in repeating everything that's in my book. It'll come out in instalments over the next few weeks, so you'll find out what I mean. On the other hand, if you can't wait that long, feel free to download the book from lulu. The downloaded PDF is only $2.95, which I'm sure you can afford!

My point is that I wrote the book partially to sum up a number of issues I found myself coming back to when talking to people or blogging or whatever. I spent several weeks on it and I really think that was time enough. The book now exists and if people really want to know what I think, well, there it is! :~ Way I see it, time is the most precious of all widely-available commodities. I have invested significant time of my life to write this; and I didn't have to write it; could have spent my time doing considerably more profitable things, spent time with my family and friends, written some more stuff on my next novel, done more sword practice, and so on. Thing is, when you come down to the basics, I wrote this book mostly for the benefit of others (unlike my novels, which I enjoy writing!). It's being serialized here as a courtesy to the Imminst people. However, anybody wants the full thing, feel free to get the whole book. It'll answer many questions you might have, though its intention is to create even more.

#7 till

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Posted 08 November 2008 - 05:25 AM

What's with the spelling? Emortalist? Does that have some special meaning, or is it just a typo?


Look here.

#8 zoolander

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Posted 08 November 2008 - 06:09 AM

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#9 till

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Posted 08 November 2008 - 06:38 AM

EMO


Hmm. Got a point there methinks. Indeed, that's partially the topic of the book. :~

Edited by till, 08 November 2008 - 06:39 AM.


#10 Lazarus Long

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Posted 08 November 2008 - 12:33 PM

Way I see it, time is the most precious of all widely-available commodities. I have invested significant time of my life to write this; and I didn't have to write it; could have spent my time doing considerably more profitable things, spent time with my family and friends, written some more stuff on my next novel, done more sword practice, and so on. Thing is, when you come down to the basics, I wrote this book mostly for the benefit of others (unlike my novels, which I enjoy writing!).


So which is it?

You do realize that you switched justifications in mid stream. You start out with an extension of your basic premise that is based on *time* as a precious commodity because it is short supply, A premise that permeates a considerable part of your thesis and by default that time loses value when the supply goes up so we should be careful about inflating the time we have because if we get too much time then it won't be worth as much given the laws of scarcity economics.

However you didn't conclude that way. Your actual conclusion is a non sequitor of the assertion and has nothing to do with time as a commodity but in fact invalidates your initial assertion because you chose to act altruistically even though it was not a labor of love (this is certainly debatable based on the definition of love) but of social obligation. It would be erroneous or deceptive to claim you do not think it was a worthy use of your time because you have already claimed a value based on a contribution to society, what you said is that you don't consider it to have been fun.

Do you really think that if you had more time in your life all you would pursue are tasks that are more fun?

Or don't you agree that a considerable amount of your tasks would also include addressing issues of social importance, or any other extended task beyond your personal (selfish) demands that you consider worthy of such sacrifice?

Our willingness to sacrifice our labor and our selves to tasks beyond our sole individual advantage does not require *less* time in our lives to become popular. Nor does having more time inevitably mitigate it.

This issue is as confused for most people as it is for you. Many have made this false connection between treating time as a commodity and the worth of our lives, the problem is that the worth of our lives is an abstract awareness established internally by our values and our consistency of conduct with them and externally by the impact of that conduct on the lives of others and life in general. This can be accomplished in the moment an infant learns to smile or a parting wisdom on a death bed but is not based on the *amount* of time between.

The worth of our life is created by the *values* we invest in it not by the amount of time we value. Time only allows us the advantage of conduct true to those values or the opportunity to fail and learn from the experience, helping us to better attain consistency with those values.

Time gives us the chance to grow and learn values we heretofore might have never considered. The true values of compassion and intelligence and information and observation and exploration even though they can be obscured by the vicissitudes of time on occasion. We will all know suffering at one *time* or another and some in their pain will try to erase their knowledge of true value, use their failure derived guilt and bitterness to rationalize a false set of values but this is not due to having more time in life, nor less, it is due to the evolution psychology and biology of how pleasure and pain are experienced within the mind.

For example given enough time the true value of love will inevitably come to dominate the minimal worth of hate. Time is not the force of corruption, it is merely a companion aspect to the process of decay. Like travel; distance over time. Both growth and decay require time and having more time does not lend value to growth and learning, only opportunity. Nor does more time in life mitigate the threat of decadence and despair, in fact it would only prolong it but provide with each waking moment another opportunity for a reversal of ill fortune.

#11 till

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Posted 09 November 2008 - 10:03 AM

Ahh, Laz, I am not one for the finer points of philosophy, I'm afraid, and so I'll instead continue with the Introduction and the chapter following, entitled "Emortalist Philosophizing".

Introduction


This book is not a treatise, a learned tome, a carefully structured introduction to Emortalism, a proselytizing rant, a biography, or any of a number of other things I can’t think of right now. It is instead a spontaneous, mostly unedited, personal statement written with people in the immortalist/transhumanist ‘community’ in mind.
Its purpose, insofar as it has one, is nebulous, though clearly it has one; otherwise why would I spend significant chunks of my life and thinking time to write it. I do have more on my plate than I can eat; and, really, another project?...
So, it’s going to be a short book, with lots of flow-of-consciousness topics, no references for materials I might be talking about, and definitely no endless editing cycles.

Names matter, and this book’s title includes the term to ‘Emortalism’, because I’m not going to talk about ‘immortality’, which is a corrupt and overloaded term that does more harm than good, especially when it comes to ‘publicity’ issues. Instead I prefer to use ‘Emortality’, a term coined by Alvin Silverstein and first used publicly in his book The Conquest of Death, of which I happen to have a treasured signed copy.
The first time I came across the term was in a novel called Eternity by Mack Reynolds, and it was only years later that I discovered the true origin of the word.
The ‘E’ in ‘Emortality’ stands for ‘ex’, that being a Latin suffix denoting ‘out’. ‘Ex-mortal’ thus means something like living outside mortality, with ‘mortality’, so much is clear from Silverstein’s context, referring to the kind that kills through what right now is considered ‘natural’ old-age decay, disease and so on. Hence ‘emortal’ denotes a state of affairs where one has stepped out of and/or is outside that framework of necessity.
This contrasts with ‘immortality’, which implies a deathless life. I consider ‘immortality’ an oxymoron. Though I will use it occasionally, it is usually for the purpose of reference to a particular group of people. Thus I may refer to the ‘immortalist/transhumanist’ community, because that’s how these people might refer to themselves. But that is all.

This book is not meant to provide answers, but to stimulate questions. I caution the reader to remember this. Whenever you appear to come across an ‘answer’ of sorts, or some statement that doesn’t have a bunch of sentences or paragraphs of justification attached to it, think of it as a question.
Living with questions instead of answers is the most important thing you will need to learn if you want to live as an Emortal. If you don’t, you’ll end up as a moron, and sooner or later—probably sooner than you’d think right now—you’ll kill yourself. That’s because life lived around ‘answers’ is ultimately boring and, as you’ll find out in due course, devoid of meaning. Life revolving around question, on the other hand, is almost infinitely interesting.
Maybe the main point I would like to put across in this little volume is this: ‘Being emortal’ isn’t just a state of being physically long-lived. Being emortal is all about living as if you were emortal, or at least as if you were living in the initial phases of an emortal existence. It’s a state of mind. Not something that you might be one day when the world obliges you and gives you what you want, but something that you ought to act out as if it already were so.
The way I like to look at it is like: “Well, I’m waiting for a problem to be solved; but solved it will be, and so now let’s think about the future with that in mind.”
What are the consequences? How will I and we deal with them? What needs to be done? What do I need to do? Now. What do I need to be, so that things will work out? What will it mean for those people I care about? What price will I have to pay, so that things will work out—for me, for my loved ones, for every-damn-body? For nothing is ‘free’. Only fools think otherwise, and Emortals can’t afford to be fools.
If you train yourself to think that way, to feel that way, to act that way in whatever you do, suddenly you may find that things in life are different; very much so—even if you are unfortunate enough not to make it into humankind’s next stage of history. At least you did what you could.

Emortalist Philosophizing

Emortalists, like the rest of those of a transhuman disposition, are an elite. By that I don’t mean that they are better than those who aren’t similarly disposed: just that they are different and in a minority; and they are, let’s face it, just a tad ahead of the times—at least right now. In that sense they satisfy the requirements for ‘elitism’. They also, by and large, think of themselves as an elite, even though for many of them that’s an un-PC way of looking at things.
With Emortalist elitism usually comes a tendency to philosophize more than your average Joe or Jane. This may not be the case in a future when Emortalism is commonplace—though I suspect it will always be an issue, for a number of reasons—but right now, in the initial stages of the greatest revolution in human life, it definitely comes with a philosophical overhead. However, since people are lazy and tend to vector in on answers, rather than continuing to ask more probing questions, a lot of them try to get the philosophizing over and done with, find their answers and then go ahead and keep philosophy on a utilitarian backburner. They find some comfortable modus vivendi and soon settle into a mental rut not dissimilar to that of your average deathist. Inquiry metamorphoses into answer-provision and dogma. Said dogma usually maximizes the emotional comfort level of the individual concerned.
During my years as an Emortalist I’ve come across a scintillating range of emortalist dogma/ideology, ranging from that of Leonard Orr’s ‘Rebirthers’ and Stuart Otto’s Affiliated Christian Immortalists, to T. Kun’s Project Mind, the Cryonics crowd and the posthumanist believers. I cannot help but be touched by their earnestness, because I understand the source of their desires. However, I am also put off by what amounts to their unwillingness to think just a few steps beyond the point where they apparently stop thinking. This is a common human failing, but in Emortalists it’s much more consequential than in the rest of humanity. It is not without irony that this refusal to think further than one’s nose is also necessary.
Ideology, secular or religious, accompanies most of human social organization. It’s like social glue. Groups that buck the general trend of things are even more in need of such glue than those whose practices find no resistance and basically go with the flow. Said ‘flow’ is social flow, of course; whatever happens to be ‘in’ at the time and the place.
Fervor can be generated in two ways: (a) by what amounts to mass-hysteria, where everybody thinking alike produces an avalanche of thinking-alike and believing-alike; and (b) a need to very, very much believe, preferably unquestioningly, in something, in order to see oneself and one’s companions through difficult times, where everybody seems to be against you and difficulties pile up into apparently insuperable mountains.
The Emortalist movement certainly needs such fervor, no question about it. The forces arrayed against it are formidable. Fervor to the point of approaching religiosity is probably helpful. You got to believe something, and you got to believe that this something is worthy bringing sacrifices for. Mere ‘fear of death’ may be an initial impetus, but it’s not enough to sustain a movement. You need ideological rationalization, making it appear as if what you’re doing is actually somehow necessary good, a task ordained by ‘nature’ or the ‘cosmos’ or ‘God’ or whatever. Thus come into existence pseudo-rational philosophies that often, when you poke around in them a bit, make little sense; but what sense there is serves their purpose well enough.
Whatever philosophy one adopts tends to be a tool to justify what one wishes to achieve. In the emortalist case, the philosophies adopted purport to explicate why Emortalists want to live forever, or at the very least ‘indefinitely’. It doesn’t much matter whether they believe that God is very favorably inclined toward those wanting to be more-than-human, or whether they believe that, as the Christopher Franke song says “Time will have all the answers to the ancient questions”; and especially, as I hear again and again, the answer to the question as to our ‘real purpose in life’, or something along those lines.
I’ve been through a few philosophies in my lifetime; meaning that I’ve believed, if not six impossible things before breakfast, then at least some stuff that ultimately turned out to be either wishful delusion or unsupported by any shred of evidence. I’ve also leaped to erroneous and facile conclusions, just because I stopped thinking when I shouldn’t have. Par for the course. Maybe more so than your average Joe Blog, because I’ve done more thinking about such issues, much to the dismay of quite a few people around me, who thought and maybe still think, that I overdo the thinking.
After some 50 years of this, give or take a few, however, I’ve finally settled on a philosophy that provides me with no reason whatsoever as to why I or anyone else should have any ‘right’ at all to live forever—or any right at all to any damn thing, for that matter. I haven’t done this because it’s convenient or expedient to do so, but simply because I’ve found no evidence whatsoever to suggest that things are any different than I now suspect them to be. And, yes, I’m being cautious; not to hedge my bets, but because, like you and you and you (and you, too!), I actually ‘know’ diddly-squat about the real big picture; and I’m acutely aware that there may well be no way to sort out what’s what and whether, as the participants in an ongoing discussion in theoretical physics might see it, it’s all ‘random’ or ‘hidden variables’; or, as I sometimes suspect, neither of the two, which may well be the reason why the discussion is not going anywhere fast. This usually happens when the questions makes no sense.
But I digress.
The philosophical direction I have taken, after decades of finding dead alleys everywhere else, is known as ‘Absurdism’. If you don’t know what that is, look up the Answers.com or Wikipedia pages on the subject. In essence, Absurdism states that we’ll never figure out about the purpose/meaning of life, the universe and everything, because such a purpose/meaning simply may not exist. Even if it does exist, however, which is possible and we really can’t say for certain that it does not, it’s not something that we can ever ‘discover’, in the sense of making it ‘explicit’. Still, despite all that, we can make our lives mean something, but it’s not necessary that we do, and if and when we do, said ‘meaning’ is fabricated and illusory, though it may serve to make us feel good. It makes us feel good, because it appears to produce discernible, non-random, patterns in our lives; and our brains are pattern-recognizing and pattern-creating machines and ‘feel’ best when we operate in a suitably ‘patterned’, apparently-predictable and non-random, context.
It’s all very ‘Tao’, I know, but there you have it. And it’s definitely ‘atheist’, though that is not at the core of it, but a mere detail.
The best and most accessible contemporary pop-culture examples of Absurdism can be found in the works of Joss Whedon (‘Buffy’, ‘Angel’, ‘Firefly’ TV series) or in the now-finished science-fiction TV series ‘Farscape’. Also, ironically, there was an excellent series about life after death, 'Dead Like Me', that was maybe more challengingly Absurdist than anything Joss Whedon ever produced.
Absurdism emphasizes the importance of choice, standing up for one’s choices and facing up to their consequences, intended or not. Oddly enough, it is highly moralistic—which appears paradoxical, given that in a cosmos with no guidelines provided by some higher purpose or meaning, what could one possible reference one’s morality to? Who provides moral authority if not some higher being, or maybe an intelligent and wise cosmos, or whatever?
The answer is that nobody does, yet that does not make ‘moral authority’ into an oxymoron; nor does it make for ethical relativism. It merely replaces some absolute authority by that of the individual. Ethical relativism is avoided by accepting the authority of one’s personal choices, if you will. And, yes, while others may make their own choices, and while we must accept that they do, we are still at liberty to disagree with those choices and declare that life as we would have it, should be governed by ethical and moral guidelines that we choose; and if we allow someone else to choose them for us than that, too, is a choice. The main question then is how to choose to act after having made those ethics/morals/values choices. Do we invade that country to stop the genocide there, or do we stand by and say “It’s their country!”? Do we convert these people to see the light of the True God? Stuff like that.
The important thing to realize when considering such matters is this: There is a difference between accepting that other people make their own choices and accepting those choices and their consequences!
This is a difficult path to follow, because it is so apparently paradoxical. Also, it’s almost a built-in that we think that the only way to make choices is by accepting, at least at some level, that the criteria by which we choose are somehow universal or absolute; that is, they would be accepted as valid and applicable by any rational creature.
The problem here lies, of course, with the very notion of ‘rationality’, which is assumed to be some gold-standard for judgment—which it isn’t: ‘rationality’ is merely a label for a manner of certain categories of thought-processes.
I digress yet again.
The point I’m trying to make is that there is no objective way of determining what is right or wrong, or what should or should not be done in any given circumstance. There’s only choice—to do this or that. Ultimately the choices that affect the world around us, including the ‘social’ world, are the ones expressed in ‘action’. They may have internal precursors—like we may choose to pick this or that mental position; “should I turn left or right?”—but until we actually have gone left or right, the outside world may remain unaffected by whatever happened ‘inside’. Or consider Jimmy Carter’s admission, many years back, that he had ‘committed adultery in [his] heart’. Until he mentioned it, the non-committed adultery had no effect on the world; unless one wants to point out the, philosophically trivial and implicit, connection between any thought one has and any other thought or subsequent action one may take.
Absurdism elevates ‘choice of action’ and thereby action itself to the true test of ethics and morality. Because of its lack of reference to ‘authority’ outside oneself it thereby also creates the closest thing to ‘freedom’ that a human being can ever possibly have: the freedom to make choices; without being required, or even able, to defer to external authority for reference or license.
With this freedom comes a truly awesome responsibility, which, at least in certain regard, rivals the kind of responsibility usually associated with ‘deity’. Of course, no one is ever really ‘free’, because ‘freedom’ as anything approaching an absolute, makes no sense in any context. But we’re talking of the scope of the possible here; not woolly, obtuse philosophical notions.
So, why, in this cosmos of no meaning and no purpose, should anyone want to live forever, or at least indefinitely?
If you want some grand reason: sorry, no can do. Really. No can do! There never was, isn’t and never will be that reason you’re looking for. Plus a whole lot of others also go out the window with it, because they’re somehow all related to said ‘grand reason’.
By the way, true Absurdism—without hidden ‘grand reason’ agendas; of the kind that seems to creep into the discourse without people apparently noticing it—is a difficult philosophy to live by. We all crave for certainty, at least some of it, in our decision-making processes; would like to know that we’re doing ‘the right thing’. But if we are the ones that ultimately decide what ‘the right thing’ actually is, then that leaves us with none of that certainty. It takes a fairly solid individual to carry that burden.
Still, for an Emortalist, isn’t that the only ultimate position he or she can assume?

#12 Lazarus Long

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Posted 09 November 2008 - 12:19 PM

You do realize that through all that you neither answered my question:

So which is it?


Nor addressed the fundamental aspects I raised; ergo your premise

Way I see it, time is the most precious of all widely-available commodities.


is false.

#13 Mind

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Posted 09 November 2008 - 01:28 PM

Despite any disagreements with the general philosophy, I would like to thank Till for sharing his work of prose.

Perhaps debate on the topic could be moved elsewhere (philosophy), as it is interesting.

(post edit: doh! I didn't realize it was already in the Philosophy forum....perhaps another thread for the debate)

#14 Brainbox

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Posted 09 November 2008 - 01:40 PM

Despite any disagreements with the general philosophy, I would like to thank Till for sharing his work of prose.

Perhaps debate on the topic could be moved elsewhere (philosophy), as it is interesting.

I'm wholeheartedly agreeing with this. Nothing wrong at all with lateral viewpoints on lateral viewpoints. :~

#15 Lazarus Long

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Posted 09 November 2008 - 02:01 PM

Despite any disagreements with the general philosophy, I would like to thank Till for sharing his work of prose.


I second this too and will add that Till is an old member that has returned after a long absence. He was missed and is always welcome. I did already comment to him privately about this for the record. I must be careful of being too much the ogre.

Our disagreements are academic and have never been personal. I am very glad he has returned because regardless of disagreement, our dialectic has always been constructive and his contributions astute. I guess I just returned to our relationship of old and thank you for reminding me to mind my manners Mind, such social courtesy is very important too.

#16 till

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Posted 09 November 2008 - 08:44 PM

Despite any disagreements with the general philosophy, I would like to thank Till for sharing his work of prose.


I second this too and will add that Till is an old member that has returned after a long absence. He was missed and is always welcome. I did already comment to him privately about this for the record. I must be careful of being too much the ogre.

Our disagreements are academic and have never been personal. I am very glad he has returned because regardless of disagreement, our dialectic has always been constructive and his contributions astute. I guess I just returned to our relationship of old and thank you for reminding me to mind my manners Mind, such social courtesy is very important too.


Thanks, Laz. I'll just continue on my merry way then, and post the next part of what Brainbox called a 'lateral viewpoint'. :~

Life, Death and Nobility

One of the silliest notions to emerge from the deathist camp—exemplified by Leon Kass and his ilk—is the idea that you have to be mortal to be noble; or, even sillier, that being mortal somehow makes you noble and that taking away mortality takes away any chance for being noble.
At the very least the argument evidences screwy logic. The error committed here is known as ‘denying the antecedent’:
If P, then Q.
Not P.
Therefore, not Q.

If mortal, then noble (possibly).
Not mortal.
Therefore not noble (not even possibly).

The assertion here is of course, stronger than outline above suggests. The first line actually should read: If, and only if, P, then Q. Meaning that Q proves P.
Clearly that’s an entirely a priori assertion, which itself can never be proved. So, if Kass and his ilk advance this or a related argument, one always needs to keep in mind that everything stands and falls with the definition of ‘nobility’. They are also prone to pointing out—along the lines of John 15:13: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”—that this is probably the ultimate evidence of the ennobling aspects of mortality.
And, let’s face it, there’s some truth in this. For what greater sacrifice can one bring for others than that of one’s life? Or as the character ‘Sebastian’ in the TV series Babylon 5, another one of the ‘great’ stories of modern times, says: “How do you know the chosen ones. No greater love hath a man, than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame... For one person. In the dark, where no one will ever know or see.” Indeed, indeed. And if one loves life and if there’s no great reward for doing this in the afterlife, if there’s not even the consolation of being remembered as a good and noble person because nobody knows what one has done, then the sacrifice and the love expressed by such a sacrifice surely must rank among the noblest sentiments a human being could ever be capable of.
But this death, this sacrifice, was chosen! Meaning that bringing this kind of thing up in the context of nobility-and-mortality arguments is completely nonsensical. If anyone, and especially someone who claims to be ‘intelligent’, brings it up, two conclusions may be drawn: either he is actually not all that intelligent, or he is deliberately trying to mislead and deceive. I leave it to you to decide which is which in each instance you might come across.
On the other hand, it’s just possible that it is true that given the right circumstances, anybody can be made to believe anything.
The other reason why the nobility-and-mortality argument outlined above doesn’t fly is that, let’s face it, the vast majority of people never get to sacrifice their lives for anything or anyone. The kind of nobility bestowed by ‘sacrifice’ is exceptional, and not everyone is exceptional by definition! Most of us die pathetically; the deaths meaningless and devoid of nobility, doing nobody any good, excepting maybe ‘evolution’; and, as I’m going to point out in another part of this book, evolution isn’t necessarily benign.
And last, and most of all, the pro-death argument fails, because a life is sacrificed much easier and less ‘nobly’, if one thinks that there’s something ‘after’ it. This is why I never bought into the Christian story about Jesus and his sacrifices and resurrection and all that jazz. Even assuming that the story is anything but apocryphal… So they tortured him? Big deal. What’s a few days of pain when you’ll be ‘saved’ for the trouble and richly rewarded for all eternity, Amen? Especially if you have delusions of grandeur and think that your death is somehow special and will ‘save’ the human race. From what? I’ve yet to figure that one out, because if you follow that reasoning further, the whole story makes less sense than a really, really bad movie plot. That this one turned out to be a blockbuster surely tells us something about the sad state of human intelligence, which is in grave need of a few tweaks here and there.
I know, some people will argue that the story of Jesus is really about ‘faith’. That’s cool, too. But it’s easy to have faith in that which cannot be disproved or subjected to ‘reality checks’. The vast majority of people do it on a regular basis; at all levels, not just relating to the usual religious stuff. The human brain has an easier time believing the un-disprovable than it has living with doubt.


Evolution and Nature


I’m indebted to Nick Bostrom for helping me to sort out something in my mind that’s been lurking there un-sorted. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of it, but sometimes you need someone to kind of wrap things up in-summary in such a way as to elicit an “Aha!” kind of reaction. In this instance it’s about the whole ‘nature’ and ‘evolution’ thing.
If I tried to sum up how I see the ‘evolution’ thing in a few points, it might look like this:

(1) Evolution needs death. Without death there’s no ‘evolution’, only ‘change’.
(2) Evolution is never ‘design’, not even indirectly. It’s not that the watchmaker is blind: there is no watchmaker.
(3) The results of evolution are kluged-together structures that just happen to ‘work’; few of them optimally.
(4) Evolution is very inefficient in its use of time and resources.
(5) Evolution isn’t even a ‘process’ per se, but is just a label tacked onto a whole complex of interacting physical laws and structures, resulting almost entirely from a combination of random contingency and conditions that in turn are the results of whatever went before; and which might well have been entirely different.

Despite all this, somehow evolution resulted in the current existence of physical/functional structures we call ‘human beings’. These creatures are capable something called ‘intentionality’, a fascinating attribute that defies precise definition; just like many other ‘mental’ properties. Human beings are also capable of investigating the systematicities of the physical universe, long-term planning and ‘design’. This results in an activity known as ‘engineering’.
Engineering is profoundly different from the evolutionary process in that it is not random, and in that the variables involved in design, development and production can all, at least in principle, laid bare for inspection.
I know, engineering sometimes doesn’t produce very effective results; and when it comes to biology, its complexities are daunting. But it is, together with investigative science, a triumph by any standards, and it is certainly less wasteful than evolution.
Those who would argue otherwise, who would say that it’s unnatural and produces a lot of destructive results, I would say this:
(1) Nobody says the process if perfect. Also, it is a process practice by creatures who are themselves the imperfect results of an very long chain of kluges. So give us a break, will you!
(2) If there’s one thing evolutionary science has discovered beyond any point of argument, it is that ‘evolution’ as a process has been consistently and, one might say ‘terrifyingly’, destructive of its products. Whatever we have may have wrought with our imperfections fades into pathetic insignificance when compared to the indifferent destructiveness of ‘natural’ processes such as ‘evolution’.
Those opposed to the Emortalist project often cite ‘the end of evolution’ as a reason not to embark on it. I used to consider the argument at least moderately cogent. Now I realize just how silly it is.
The silliest aspect is the notion that we can trust ‘nature’ and/or ‘evolution’ to do what is necessary and, in a way, ‘right’ for us as human beings. Trust that whatever it comes up with is going to be the best thing that could happen, and certainly better than what our own paltry efforts at anticipating, designing, planning, engineering would lead us to.
Well, people, the truth is that there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that this is so. Indeed, it is utterly witless to suggest it. It’s worse, in many ways, than your average monotheist religious reasoning. Why? Because at least that kind of religion places all natural ‘intentionality’ into the hands of some ‘higher’, usually extra-universal, authority. Those who attribute ‘intentionality’ to a universe in which the only known intentionality found in human beings and not in some ‘natural process’ like evolution, commit a far graver error of judgment.
Evolution has nothing to offer to human beings. Indications are, as recent mathematical analyses of the distribution and movement of the Human Genome reveal, that the contrary may indeed be true. We should consider ourselves lucky that evolution has gotten us to this point at all. There is not a shred of evidence, direct or circumstantial—nor is there any law of logic—suggesting that its influence on our future will be benign, or beneficial to the survival of, or what you might call ‘positive’ for the development of, the human species.
The cessation of the usual haphazard evolutionary processes through whatever means we care to dream up is therefore not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, once we get over our infatuation with the ‘natural’—a concept about as nebulous and imprecise as you can get!—we’ll soon realize that we can probably do much better, despite our imperfections. And, yes, I know it’s dangerous, as such things are—but no more dangerous that letting evolution have its continued way with us.
The one main reason for our laissez-faire attitude toward evolution is low self-esteem with regards to ourselves as human beings. I know this runs contrary to the trend that attributes to us excessive hubris, but this just isn’t so. By and large we think little of ourselves; even those whom we would normally attribute hubris to: scientists and technologists in particular. Religious belief of all kinds—a major indicator of low ‘humanist’ self-esteem—is rampant among scientists just like everywhere else. Though it is used in the context of the major Western religions as an apparent means to bolster our significance, it really does just the opposite. This kind of reasoning and behavior is just a variant of a weak-willed loser attaching himself as a follower to some alpha-male gang leader, thereby thinking to increase his own importance through association. Followers have a tendency to emulate their leaders—much as they may secretly despise them for being ever-present evidence of their own weakness—and, by aping what they consider their leaders’ attributes and ways of behaving, attempt to be ‘like them’ by proxy. That doesn’t mean they have a high self-esteem. It just means that they have no power of their own.
These unedifying aspects of human nature are just as much a product of ‘evolution’ as those we tend to hold in high esteem. And is that really any reason to ‘trust evolution’ to work to improve our species?
Of course, what is ‘improvement’? If nothing is of intrinsic value, then the human species has just as little ‘value’ to anything at all, as little ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ as…oh, say, roaches.
So why bother?
Because we choose it to be so.
That’s all. And in a similar vein we ought to choose to kiss evolution good-bye and get on with getting as much ‘value’ as we can out of our species.
Or maybe ‘getting’ is the wrong word. ‘Creating’ is much more to the point.

#17 John_Ventureville

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Posted 10 November 2008 - 09:52 AM

Hello Till,

I just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading the chapter focusing on your childhood. My own experience regarding "waking up" to the possibilities of extreme longevity was around age ten when I was reading a children's Bible story about how at one time humans lived for many centuries. I walked over to my mother and asked, "wouldn't it be great if people still lived that long?" And she readily agreed. I enjoyed your tale of devouring Perry Rhodan features as a youth and how the authors actually addressed the matter of the hero living through so many near countless adventures, and the answer was anti-aging medicine!

The equivalent reading material for me was the Professor Jameson science fiction series, written by Neil R. Jones during the 30's, 40's and 50's. The main character, Professor Jameson, has himself cryonically preserved upon his death and then shot into space to orbit the Earth in a capsule. Alien cyborgs came along who restored his brain to life and put it inside one of their robot shell bodies. He joined the aliens and went on many exciting adventures as they explored the universe together. These books gave a sense of immense passages of time passing by, and a mission might easily take centuries, if not millennia, to complete. Robert Ettinger read this series and considered it one of the inspirations that lead to him to help get cryonics established.

http://en.wikipedia....i/Neil_R._Jones

http://thenostalgial...ag/jameson.html

I never had a bad experience as a child similar to yours where I suddenly was agonizingly aware of my impending death and was badly shaken by it. But I did nearly drown around age twelve and only a slender protruding vine that I caught in the nick of time saved my life. It was that experience that gave me the realization that one moment of bad judgement in the wilderness, riding a bike, talking to a violent person, etc., could result in my death.

I look forward to finishing your book!

John Grigg

#18 till

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Posted 10 November 2008 - 07:39 PM

Hey, John, thanks for that!

I also missed either death or at the very least serious injury at least twice that I know of, and it may have been thrice, but about that I'm not sure. Plus I not only survived diphtheria when I was a child but apparently suffered no ill after effects, which apparently is very rare. So, somehow, life seems to kinda like me, which is nice. And it makes one cautious. My sports, in so far as I have involved myself in them were always 'safe' activities, though you wouldn't believe it when you look at my record; like fencing, some jujitsu and Samurai swordcraft. But these activities teach one such skills as coordination, dexterity, awareness and so on, and those are survival skills. But try to get me to ski or do other things that involve highly dangerous things at risky speeds or suchlike, and thanks, but no, thanks! Life's too precious to waste it on pointless exposure to danger. If one has to risk it, then let it be for something worthwhile. If one has to die, let that death count for something; not just be some pointless snuffing-out.

Continuing the narrative in the next installment...

Thanks again for your comments.
Till

#19 till

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Posted 10 November 2008 - 07:48 PM

Loss

The longer you live, the more people around you will die. This isn’t just ‘opinion’ but irrefutable fact. The only thing that could invalidate this fact would be the introduction of absolute immortality for everyone of the set of ‘people around you’. Period.
Apart from death, which is a definite and terminal ‘loss’, there are other ways in which people will disappear from your life. For example, there’s the whole issue of the “until death do us part” affirmation, which I’ll talk about in another section. People will be ‘lost’ for you for many reasons, of which death is just the most final one. I’ve ‘lost’ contact with people, who might or might not be dead by now, but I can’t tell, because I don’t even know how to find them, though in a few instances I tried several times. For all practical purposes these people are ‘lost’ to me, and in some instances I regret this very much. But if, like us, you’ve moved around the world a lot, this kind of thing happens, no matter how hard you try not to let it.
In this section I want to focus on the loss of people due to death.
People distant and close to you will die, the longer you’re around for. They may die because they haven’t got an option—shit happens!—or because they choose to die. Some of these people may be very close to you.
This so far this isn’t all that different from ordinary life. I my lifetime I’ve lost a number of people to death, and with some of them it still leaves me with a big empty space where they used to be whenever I think about them. But they’re gone, some of them for quite a long time, and while time doesn’t heal all wounds, it kind of papers them over—most of the time.
Emortals will be faced with loss again and again. As such they will have to develop mechanism to cope with such events. One of those mechanisms is detachment.
Detachment is very effective. It’s not that one doesn’t care about what happened, but the grief is dulled and dealt with by what amounts to standing back mentally and emotionally, and basically telling oneself what I said above: “This is going to happen again and again and again; so learn to live with it.” It’s a way of gaining ‘perspective’; of removing oneself from being in a situation to standing outside it. It’s a technique that comes in useful in many situations. Indeed, one might argue that the world would be a better place if people practiced more ‘perspective getting’. I’m inclined to agree.
Detachment is an essential part of Buddhist teaching. The practitioner is admonished to practice it in order to alleviate suffering, which, Buddhists rightly observe, comes from a lack of detachment. Dealing with suffering is central to Buddhism, and who could argue with it? Emortals would make good Buddhists from that point of view, because adopting the ‘detachment’ option is surely the best way to deal with the endless string of grief we’re likely to face. Develop a serenity that helps one through these dark moments.
Or so one would think.
I don’t.
I used to, but I don’t anymore.
The ‘detachment’ method of coping with loss, while effective in my own experience, is probably the most insidiously dangerous choice to make. It’s all right, if you’re a 70-odd year mortal, or even a 150-odd year mortal. Chances are that you’re going to be hit by a cause for grief at some stage, and, let’s face it, bad things like the loss of a beloved spouse can actually kill people and do so on a regular basis. Learning to stand back can save your life, and also help those around you; like maybe your kids, who really need you functioning and not be some nervous wreck. So, yes, the technique can yield significant benefits and probably will. There probably won’t be any time for it to become so habitual that you soon lose any ability to remain in the situation and to experience grief. And grief isn’t a bad thing; it just becomes that way when it becomes chronic.
But things are different when you’re emortal. The danger of creating rutted mind-tracks increases with every year of your life. This doesn’t just happen to ‘old people’ whose bodies and brains are falling apart. It happens because of the way the nervous system is built up, as well as basic human psychology; and that’s not going to be changed a lot merely by living a long time. As we get older, ways of automatically dealing with specific stimuli or situations tend to establish themselves as ever harder-to-remove patterns of thought and behavior. If left unchecked and unexamined, the individual concerned won’t even be able to know anymore what kind of a sclerotic, rutted person he or she has become.
This kind of thing expresses itself in a rather subtle and insidious manner in the way a person exhibits a tendency to give more answers than asking questions when getting older. Many of these answers usually will not change much for, say, the second half of the average human life. Every answer that doesn’t change is a ‘rut’ of sorts. Of course, you need some answers for coping with the exigencies of daily life and whatever it throws at you, but even here it’s not always beneficial to leave responses to stimuli unexamined, especially if they produce non-beneficial results.
Detachment as a ‘rut’ is dehumanizing. That doesn’t invalidate its utility, nor does it belittle Buddhist philosophy. It’s just that it’s such an easy way out of having to deal with loss that it’s likely to become an irreversible habit. It will eventually stunt any recognizable human emotional response. As a result, the person affected will either become an organic automaton—just about the worst kind of creature springing from the ranting of the likes of Leon Kass—or, alternatively, seek emotional stimulation from sources that could range from the merely strange to the horrifically deviant. It already happens occasionally, usually with people who have a screwed-up brain chemistry. With Emortals it could become commonplace, as a result of over-practice.
In the end, everything that’s likely to create uncontrolled or contingent emotional pain—meaning un-planned pain that comes about because ‘shit happens!’ rather than as the result of some intentional action—will eventually be dealt with in the same way.
I suppose, the ‘rationalists’ of the world—meaning those who believe that a human being can in principle be mostly rational, with emotion manipulated and/or controlled by ‘reason’—will rejoice at the prospect of achieving their long dreamed-of goals. But it’s not that simple, except maybe for rationalists. And actually it isn’t simple even for them; they just have the answers, and aren’t pained by vexing questions anymore—questions that might be prompted if they were forced to face the raw nature of their ‘emotional’ side.
The idea of a future of detached, serene people horrifies me more than, I suspect, it horrifies even your average anti-immortalist. That’s because I’m a story-teller; a writer of fiction that deals not so much with ideas but with people and their emotions and motivations. And I am very emotional about a great many things; only with the likes of me I suppose you’d call it ‘passionate’. Passion about what one does. Passion about the people one loves. Passion for the future. Passion for living. Passion for being human.
Passion is an emotional thing. ‘Rational passion’ is an oxymoron.
As for how to best deal with loss and its pain, if not with detachment and perspective, once again I’d like to point to stories that deal with the subject; for stories, imaginative narratives, is all we have to guide us in that area. Probably the most relevant is one written by that great, and sadly long-dead, libertarian and immortalist, Robert A. Heinlein: Time Enough For Love.
There is much ‘loss’ in TEFL, but probably the most poignant is the one of ‘Dora’; a loss that, even after millennia, has not been forgotten and been ‘with’ the protagonist throughout his long life. Indeed, it could be argued that one of the unspoken reasons as to why, after 2500 years, he wants to call it quits, is that he thinks that, no matter how long he lives, Dora can never be ‘replaced’; in his thoughts, in is feelings, in what she meant to him and continues to mean. Doesn’t mean he obsesses with her; it’s just that she was, is and remains an irreplaceable, incomparable, immeasurable ‘significance’.
The answer provided by TEFL is simple; superficially paradoxical, and yet the only answer possible for someone who accepts the inherently absurd and idiosyncratic nature of what it is to be human.
Accept the loss. Do not deny it or its reality or gravity; its dismal and grievous terrible-ness; the great black void it leaves behind in life: yours and the world’s. Though the lost one can never be replaced, and though it doesn’t make a smidgen of difference to that person anymore, honoring them and their memory and what they were, might at least make a difference to those still living.
Above all: stay alive—so that you can remember.
For if you die, then even the memory of what that person was, if only in their significance to you, is gone; and the one you lost will have joined the forgotten billions of forever-lost lives.
I know, the cosmos doesn’t give a damn. It’s can’t give a damn—about memory and meaning and all that kind of thing. But we can if we choose to do so.
With the memory we need to accept the joy and the sadness. The joy of once having had the privilege of having the lost one as part of our lives. The sadness of them not being here anymore.
Survival—far from being a betrayal of the now-dead lost one, as many would no doubt think of it—is the only way in which we can honor them and allow something of them to continue existing. Survival doesn’t have to be just for ourselves.
Detachment will kill the memory and the significance of the one who is gone and thus completely obliterate them. Only acceptance of the loss and the pain can avoid that.
And, yes, life will go on. And there will indeed be others who will assume equal significance to the lost one—not to ‘replace’ them, but to assume ‘a’ place in one’s life that holds comparable importance. But they will appear when it is time for them to appear. As long as there’s time enough.
It’s a tough call, and it presents us with an apparent irresolvable emotional dilemma: how to be completely and utterly engaged with and devoted to our loved one, and yet know that one day we will lose them—unless we go first, of course. But, as a character in the movie Shadowlands put it: “Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”
That’s the deal.

Till Death Do Us Part

In the 1943 movie adaptation of the tale of Baron Münchhausen, the outrageous tales are told by an apparent descendant of the legendary ‘Baron’; who in the end turns out to be the Baron himself, given immortality by a sorcerer some 200 years before. Kind oft of a Wandering Jew, but without the immortality being a curse. After all the stories were told, the Baron reveals his true identity to the woman he loves and ‘returns’ the gift he had been given, because, as he said to the woman: “You I love.”.
The basic moral of that aspect of the story is that immortality and love are somehow incompatible, and that once you love someone, you’ll really not want to survive them by much, because they’re the love of your life and all that, and what’s the point of living if you can’t be with them?
When people get married, at least in the Western world, they by and large do this under the assumption of an expectable maximum Till-‘Death-Do-Us-Part’ (DDUP) time of, say, 50 years; maybe 60, if you strike it lucky and get married early. The commitment to the other person—nowadays often called a ‘partner’—is of strictly finite duration. After the first rush of feeling-good has worn off and life’s practicalities rise in importance and eclipse it, this finite togetherness with someone else usually still looks manageable. Oddly enough, the fact that this commitment is for the ‘rest of your life’—for males more so than for females, since the latter tend to live longer—doesn’t seem to come into the rationalization process as much as the factor of the time-span manageability; like “Can I live with this person for this long? Do I have enough love/affection for or connection to this person to live with him/her for that kind of time?”
In real life a lot of people answer “no”; maybe not immediately, but well before the DDUP point. In which case ‘DDUP’ becomes an acronym for ‘Divorce-Do-Us-Part’. And that’s with everybody still considering themselves mortal!
With Emortalism, waiting until the ‘death’ version of DDUP-day could take a very long time; a very, very long time. Even the greatest love will have seriously trying times surviving to that point. That’s because ‘love’ is, after all, a complex of emotions, whose main utility lies in establishing and maintaining pair-bonding for the usual biological purposes. That it turns out to look like ‘more’ than that is incidental. Nature and evolution don’t ‘design’ things like engineers; it’s all about what ‘works’ and what doesn’t, and what effect it has on species propagation. ‘Love’ is one of those things that does indeed ‘work’, at least in a sufficient majority of instances for it to remain a feature of the human psyche. It’s probably overkill, at least if we consider the purely utilitarian aspect of it. But it’s one of those things that is just so wonderful that one doesn’t mind the overkill. With the ‘wonderfulness’ of it also come, as these things tend to work, equally severe ‘scariness’ aspects.
But ‘love’ and its milder-natured psychological relatives definitely aren’t designed to cope with centuries and millennia of extended human life spans. And the likelihood that the first ‘D’ in DDUP will mean ‘Divorce’ is going to be close to certainty. That doesn’t devalue the relationship that exists at a time when ‘love’ is strong enough to make the likelihood of severing of the relationship almost non-existent. But things end, and while it isn’t certain that a given pair-bond-relationship of the traditional kind will end before one of the emortal participants dies, it’s still extremely likely in the vast majority of cases. “I’ll love you forever,” will change its meaning once ‘forever’ doesn’t imply a death, but actually means ‘1000+ years’.
Emortal societies will have to adapt to this new situation; and adapt they will. Robert Heinlein’s protagonist, Lazarus Long, from Time Enough For Love, as well as the society he belongs to, exemplify such a state of affairs. The definition of what constitutes a ‘romantic relationship’ will undergo inevitable change.
So far, this is all pretty obvious, I’d say. Most of those who have thought about a future with Emortals in it, would have come to similar conclusions.
But this isn’t the whole story, and it stops short of considering what’s really likely to happen in the interim—between now and when everybody is, or at least some of us are, emortal.
The issue is that there will be an inevitable division between Emortals and those who aren’t (let’s call them ‘Ephemerals’). This is a matter of practicality. It isn’t going to be something that’s done to everybody at the same time, for any number of reasons. Even within a nation capable of delivering an Emortality treatment to all of those citizens who need and want it, it’s not going to happen. That’s mainly because there will be those who, for a number of reasons, are going to refuse it. Said reasons may include everything from disbelief in the treatment to ethical/moral/religious objections.
There is no doubt in my mind that when this thing finally comes down, society will be split along a divide that’s far deeper and more profound than something trivial like, just to pick a random example, the liberal-conservative chasm existing in American society today. And you can see how deep that one is! Yet it will pale into insignificance in comparison with what is heading our way.
The situation across nations will even be more severe and virtually unbridgeable. On one side of the divide will be those whose lives will continue to be ephemeral and who believe in the ‘death’ version of DDUP. On the other side will be Emortals who simply cannot look at things in that way anymore. Not forever anyway. Many of them might, from old habits of thinking and social conditioning, continue to think of their spouses in the same way as they used to, for a while at least. But even they will know, deep down, that things aren’t as they used to be. Just how long they’ll be able to live in denial, will depend on their psychological makeup. One thing’s for certain though: people will ultimately change and adapt to the new conditions. Whatever they change into is a different question altogether; one that doesn’t have a simple or single answer.
You have to consider the real reasons why many couples stay together, and why it’s considered socially unacceptable to walk out on one’s spouse. One of these is that the social fabric of many societies is built around ‘family’, nuclear and/or extended. The destruction of family is therefore closely associated with the destruction of social fabric. Religion also comes into this, of course; but then again, religion is part of ‘social fabric’.
But on a personal level there’s a much more significant reason, that adds to the others, and it is this: commitment. In an Ephemeral’s life, being in a relationship is an investment in commitment. You go down the path of life together, and it gets to the point where your biological clock is ticking down, especially for women. Being deserted by a spouse gets worse the later in life it happens, because the chances of finding another with whom one can connect in a similar way is low. It can and does happen, but it isn’t common. The resentment created by desertion is, in no small part, encapsulated in the phrase “I gave him/her the best years of my life, and now look what s/he has done to me!”
Yes, people do love each other, and there are many families where ‘love’, in whatever transmuted form from the initial ‘romance’, is the true bonding element. But I also think that the pretense of love, where in truth there is a whole complex of other factors in the game, is a major element in holding most human relationships together. Look around for the signs, among relatives, friends, acquaintances, or just plain strangers. They are much more numerous than you’d want to believe.
There are also bonds forged by familiarity and fondness created by long-term association. All of those are also real and indeed effective, and in many cases supplant the initial pair-bonding heat, or act as a support for whatever that has transmuted into.
But lots of couples separate and/or divorce. This is a reality. Fact is that maintaining ‘love’, in a form that’s recognizable as ‘love’, is not easy; and most people are just too damn lazy to work on it, or too selfish/self-centered/self-involved/uniopic to be capable of sustaining it.
“I gave him/her the best years of my life, and now look what s/he has done!”…
That particular accusation makes no sense for an Emortal. The best years of one’s life may be yet to come; and indeed there’s every chance that they are!
Actually, I can see that Emortalism may catch on in many Ephemerals as a consequence of being deserted by one’s spouse/lover/partner. What better way of having the last laugh or the last word, or of defying the odds and turning what’s been a dastardly deed committed on oneself by another, into a potential triumph?
And now, imagine that you’re living in a society—and a world—populated by Emortals and Ephemerals, living side by side. Imagine this everyday world around you as it might be; where that emortal woman sitting over there in the commuter train has just dissolved her contract with her emortal spouse, while the Ephemeral sitting beside her still believes that her marriage is sanctioned and ordained by God and can only end with the death of one of the partners. Imagine what it’ll be like to—at least for a while, maybe a decade, maybe a century, maybe longer—in which you can’t know just how deep the gulf is between yourself and the stranger sitting right beside you.
Which leads me into the next topic.

#20 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 10 November 2008 - 09:04 PM

I was reminded of the Immortalist Mannifesto for some reason: http://www.immortalism.com/

Till--great avatar art! I hope to see you around at ImmInst for a long time, your views are very much in line with others here, and you bring up some great points for discussion :)

#21 till

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Posted 11 November 2008 - 08:51 PM

I was reminded of the Immortalist Mannifesto for some reason: http://www.immortalism.com/

Till--great avatar art! I hope to see you around at ImmInst for a long time, your views are very much in line with others here, and you bring up some great points for discussion :)


Thank you, Shannon. Stimulating productive discussion and maybe providing some, occasionally provocative, lateral thoughts would be good for everyone involved, methinks. Sometimes, in order to do that, things just need to be said and to be said as one sees them. I may be wrong with some of my thinking of course—it's been known to happen! :) —but that's no reason not to spell it out.

Cheers
T

And here's the next installment:

Ephemerals and Emortals

I don’t like the word ‘deathist’ because it’s implicitly derogatory and gets deathists’ heckles up; and that’s never good. I don’t like the term ‘immortal’ either, because that’s as close to loony-religious as you can get, and besides, it just evidences the philosophical naiveté of those who use it. Because of this I am going to stick to ‘ephemeral’ and ‘emortal’, which also has a good sound to it—and sounds are important. In this instance the sound reinforces the non-judgmental nature of the implied descriptions. Heinlein uses the term ‘Ephemerals’ as well, and what’s good enough for RAH is good enough for me.
Anyway, this section is about Ephemerals and Emortals. In keeping with the spirit of my disjoint narrative, I’d like to emphasize that I don’t necessarily mean real, i.e. biological, Ephemerals or Emortals. Ephemeralism and Emortalism are states of mind; and one of the aims of this little book is to impress on the reader the need to be an Emortalist, with all the mental and attitudinal attributes that entails, even before the biological aspect of it has become realized. Just how important that is, can be driven home by the simple expedient of becoming somewhat less ‘uniopic’—a neologism, meaning ‘having a single point of view’—and looking around at the people around us. Not necessarily just the ones we are with every day—family, friends, colleagues, etc—but the ones we see in what you might call ‘the street’: Ephemerals all; a safe assumption, given the scarcity of Emortals; biological and/or ‘mental’.
Go out there, budding Emortal, and open your eyes to what you can see…
And what do you see?
What I see, is a mass of people, who right now, are utterly and scarily unprepared for being anything but Ephemerals. Literally every aspect of their lives is in some way conditioned by the basic assumption of the ephemeral nature of human existence.
What I see are people who know they’ll die, yet pretend that they won’t, and that this calamity is reserved for others but themselves.
Not that many actually think about it much! I have no evidence to support this, of course, except of the circumstantial and extrapolative kind. And then there is the lack of evidence to the contrary as well: behavior that might hint at thoughts not completely conditioned and implicitly guided by the basic, underlying assumption of our ephemeral existence.
Since moving to a larger city again—Brisbane, Australia—the evidence isn’t just ‘there’, but with so many people around me, it’s kind of in-my-face every moment I spend in public. Driving through city or suburbia. Walking along busy city malls or through city-sized shopping centers. Almost 2 million Ephemerals doing their thing and doing it with utter certainty of their ephemeral nature.
Yes, I know, we don’t really believe that we are going to die one day. The thought is too big to grasp and live with on a daily basis. Extinction is just too horrible.
But it doesn’t matter what we ‘believe’, but what built-in set of implicit rules we live by. Awareness of the rules is actually by and large detrimental to the lives of most. Those who are reminded of them when they, say, go to worship their nonexistent deities, may have a greater consciousness of their mortality, but not that much more. One of the purposes of religious belief and ritual is, after all, to minimize the perceived seriousness of personal extinction, by placing physical, biological human life here and now into to a context that de-emphasizes life’s precious uniqueness.
Hence we see what we see around us: Ephemerals completely conditioned to be Ephemerals—and utterly unprepared for the major shakeup heading their way.
If you are of an Emortalist disposition, allow yourself to experience the truth of this. It won’t take long; a couple of hours should do the job. Allow yourself to be immersed in the absurdity of Ephemeral life. Understand that this is ‘normality’. Really!
Spend one hour or so in a mall, preferably on a weekend, when you get a broader spectrum of urbanite population. Spend the other hour driving through weekend suburbia and watch the things people do with their lives when they’re not whipped into line in the context of their working lives. Spend some quality time at ‘work’, whatever your profession may be, and watch your colleagues, bosses and underlings and the total subjugation of themselves to the concerns and priorities of activities, many of which are of minimal to zero importance to their lives; excepting in the sense that they need to earn the money to feed themselves and/or their dependants.
Or go into some stores. Start with your supermarket and watch the people and what they buy. How they behave. What they wear. What they hover over and agonize before they choose this or that, from a mélange of products, many of which will probably help them to die even sooner than they would if they didn’t buy them. Go into a department store and have a look at he bizarre obscenity of materialist offerings, the vast majority of which are designed and peddled solely for the purpose of diverting our attention from the fact that our lives are fragile, short, meaningless and going downhill fast.
I could go on with this litany of woe, but you may get the point, yes? If not, just spend that hour, or two, or maybe a day focusing on observing Ephemeral existence.
The exercise might make it clear just how monumental the task is that lies before us. Because you suddenly will realize that we’re not talking about just a scientific/technological problem that may well be ‘solved’ within the next decade, but with a social issue of a magnitude that boggles the mind; with a social change that is almost impossible to grasp, anticipate, or measure, and impossible to plan, and highly unlikely to be guided in an even moderately controllable fashion.
I know, immortalists and transhumanists talk about it; but talk is cheap, and I have seen or read nothing to suggest that anybody in that community actually appreciates what’s really likely to happen. The problem is that people in such small elitist interest groups tend to talk to each other or to those at least potentially similarly inclined. They speak about and discuss things, which from the ordinary man and woman—and, yes, there are such people!—would elicit what amounts to a version of a “WTF?” reaction. They gather in internet communities and talk profound talk—that’s if they don’t bicker like your average Ephemeral, which happens often—and they think that these things they talk about should and would be of interest to everybody, if only ‘everybody’ got to hear about them and had impressed upon them just how important these things are.
Well, it just ain’t so. Period.
I’m pretty good at making people think about things they haven’t thought about. I daresay I’m better at it that just about every immortalist or transhumanist you come across. It’s my business, both in my profession and my story-teller incarnation, to persuade, and to get into people’s heads and tweak the contents and directions of the thoughts in their brains. Yet even I would have very serious problems walking up to Joe and Mary Ordinaryurbnanite—the ones to convince, because more than half of all humans live in cities at the time of writing—and sell them the notion that they should not only seriously start thinking about living forever, and not just in some bunkum religious sense, but that they should also start seriously changing their lives and whatever goes on in their heads with it.
Not that I’d put it that way, because that would be the path to complete failure, but there are ways to work on these things in a roundabout way and kind of sneak them in partially by the front door and the other bits by the windows and the back door.
I just might succeed, if I really focused myself and dedicated my efforts on just one family of 25-45 year olds; probably overweight, lazy, uniopic, probably at least moderately religious, politically naïve and philosophically illiterate, paying off a mortgage, supporting this football team or that, teenage kids… Ahh, never mind; you get the idea.
I might succeed. Probably not, but it’s just possible. Joe would lose weight and think about his blood pressure some more. Mary might wonder what the hell she’s doing with Joe and what the future for her really holds. Oops! Divorce-Do-Us-Part time?
The scenario is absurd, of course. It would be wasted effort and time. It would also have more unintended consequences than intended ones, because interfering in people’s lives in such a fashion always has. That’s like a basic law of nature and especially of ‘social’ nature.
But it might work! In this case. With effort and energy and dedication and significant time investment.
But we don’t have that, do we? There are billions of to-be-convinced ‘ordinary’ people out there, and maybe, and I’m guessing, a total of a thousand or so dedicated and ‘persuasion-capable’ immortalists/transhumanists; though I doubt the numbers are that high. Which means the one-on-one scenario I outlined above is a pleasant fiction at best, and just plain silly and stupid at worst.
It is difficult enough to persuade people to stop doing stupid things that lead to their premature demise; or so start doing things that will help them to be healthier—and the ‘start doing’ is usually harder than the ‘stop doing’ part, because people are, let’s face it, lazy! Weight-loss programs and snake-oil peddling might be major industries nowadays, but that doesn’t mean that people are actually doing all this stuff; just that they’re trying and failing, and trying again, and living in denial about what they’re doing and how stupidly they are behaving. You can sell any fool anything and make them think they’re ‘doing’ something, without them actually ever…well, ‘doing’ anything. That’s the way things work.
Blame it, if you must and if it makes you feel better, on those who make money out of the rest of the ‘benighted masses’. But it doesn’t matter. The world is as it is, and I’m not trying to push a social agenda, but merely trying to point out that people are what they are and do what they do, because they are wired to behave in certain ways; and civilization, or whatever passes for it, is what it is because that’s the way people are. Our systems of politics and commerce and just ‘social life’ are the way they are because there isn’t any benign, knowing, wise guidance anywhere at the helm, but just a bunch of people, who usually are members of the benighted masses. And as far as ‘being at the helm’ goes: there is no helm, and if there were, those idiots would make a complete mess of the job anyway.
And this is, if you will, the ‘material’ we’re have to work with. And the ‘we’ I’m talking about are also human, delusions of grandeur and transhumanism though they might harbor. The self-styled elite of visionaries is just a bunch of Joe and Mary Ordinaryurbnanites in drag; aspiring to be gods, yet dragged down by their sticky, wet clay feet—and I’m not just talking about their biological ones. They may have emortal aspirations, but they think and act like Ephemerals.
This is a dismal picture, I know, and over the years it has been a source of occasional discouragement and despair. Yet, science has continued to advance, because that’s what the naked ape does so well—especially when he’s not hampered by certain really, really stupid religious constraints—and I’ve come to conclude that, yes, people may be stupid and for the most part myopic and uniopic, but that primal survival instinct of ours, combined with our cleverness may yet allow us to survive, even as individuals, despite all our drawbacks. Despite Joe and Mary Ordinaryurbnanite and their dismal existential dullness, conditioned entirely in everything they do by their assumption that humans are Ephemerals, and that anybody denying this must be referring to ‘afterlife’ of some sorts, or just be nuts.
With this social matrix to work on, and including the immensely complicating factors of the reality of differing cultures across the world, the manner in which physical longevity is introduced to the world is not only important, but will be critical to whether it spells our doom or whether it will ultimately allow the human race to overcome its ordinariness and live.

The ‘How’ Is Just As Important As The ‘What’

There are two extreme scenarios that cover how Emortality might be realized in any given individual. With the world and people being what they are, the manner in which it’s ‘really’ going to happen, within the scope of the foreseeable near-future, will be critically important to the success of the enterprise in the long run.
The first scenario is that provided by Joe Haldeman in his 1989 novel Buying Time (a.k.a. The Long Habit Of Living). This basically presupposes that life-extension is reserved for the rich—the very rich in this instance—and that it requires major medical intervention on a regular basis.
That means the numbers of those benefiting will be and remain small and select, with all the attendant problems that’s going to create. Strangely enough it’s the least difficult scenario to deal with, because in the long run there’s no doubt that either the treatment will be extended to cover larger numbers of people, though still confined to those to can afford it—or else that it will become eventually accepted, after an initial interval of profound resentment by everybody and sundry, as a fact of life: the rich live; the poor die. Tough.
This scenario isn’t as ridiculous as you might think. It’s all a question of the appropriate propaganda. The rich by and large already live longer and healthier lives than the non-rich. The poor complain. But does that change the system? Show me where it’s made a difference that the poor complain. In the end, and after any revolutions might have run their course and cut their swaths of blood and/or failed social engineering through a tiny segment of history, it ends up basically as it started.
The second scenario is much more potentially democratic and therefore, yes, ‘dangerous’. It’s provided by Steve Perry in his novel Immune Response.
It’s a pill. Just one, taken once. Maybe to be taken again in decades to come, but that’s down the track, and it doesn’t change the reality of the ‘just one pill’ right now. In Perry’s novel, of course, the rich man who financed the research and his cronies want to keep the treatment to themselves, but luck will have it that others find out about it by accident, pop said ‘pill’ and…well, the novel kind of ends there. Perry is nothing if not astute in realizing that beyond that point we’re talking serious futurology, not just thriller-fiction. And that’s a different story altogether.
I think that it’ll be a ‘pill’ of sorts that ultimately will do the job. A highly intelligent ‘pill’, but still something that’s readily mass produced; and which can be adjusted to suit diverse individuals, with only minor medical monitoring required after an initial time of adjustment and calibration to any given person.
But it’ll be a very democratic system, of that I’m almost certain. People will try to make serious money out of it, just like drug companies do now, but in the end all that will fall by the wayside. Once upon a time 80Mb disks weighed a ton, cost a mint and the drive mechanism required more electricity than your average washing machine. The Mac laptop on which I type this book has a $85 320Gb disk in it (that means it has 4000 times the storage capacity!), the platter of which has a diameter less than that of my coffee cup, and it is so thin that you can hardly see it edge-on. And the whole computer costs a minute fraction of the old 80Mb disk and its washing-machine sized drive. And it runs on a battery; all of it, disk and CPU and LCD display and all. For several hours. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
I don’t think the Haldeman scenario—which had also been used before that time in Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, even though the social conditions were different—will happen; not for serious life-extension. I’m sticking my neck out here, I know. But I think it’s safe to do so.
The democratic version is, more likely; and also far more dangerous, as must surely be clear. If we run with the extreme case of Immune Response’s plot, we have capsules you basically pop as nutritional supplements. One of them only! And even if it’s a whole bunch of them; doesn’t matter. As long as it’s something that can be mass produced and sold…hey, even the ‘third world’ could be flooded with this stuff within a few years.
With one fell swoop, those 100,000 people a day that currently have to die—this being a number bandied about by many, though its accuracy remains in question—won’t have to anymore. That would be something like 30-40 million a year, with the cumulative reproductive consequences of these people surviving not included.
Problem solved.
Sorry, problem’s just beginning.
As a story teller I tend to be more interested in the particular than the general. Also, as we know, the Devil’s managed to hide from God in the details since time immemorial; and it’s in the details of the implementation that screw-ups and bad things are most likely to happen. Any General with a decent knowledge of military history and capable of learning from it would tell you that.
The details of this scenario give Satan ample opportunity to hide.
Here’s one option:
Press/internet release by Gerotard Inc: Immortality in a Gel Cap.
The fine print:
Gerotard Inc, a company involved in research into anti-ageing treatments, announces that it has developed a ‘complete formula’ to reverse almost all the effects of ageing, extending ‘active’ human lifespan to at least 150 years, and possibly more. The treatment should be effective for over 95% of reasonably healthy individuals, up to the age of 70-80. A spokesman for the company said that the treatment, while not the ultimate anti-ageing solution, should suffice to help those for whom it is effective to live for long enough for much more advanced treatments to be developed, so that in effect it takes them to what has been termed ‘escape velocity’. This means that they ought to be able to survive for an indefinite period of time, and make death of ‘natural causes’ into a thing of the past.
The treatment cost—currently estimated at about $US 10,000 per person, but likely to drop drastically as the technology is perfected—is determined by the necessity to tailor the cocktail comprising the single dose of treatment to each individual; thus requiring a genetic scan and subsequent customizing of the chemicals for each person.
Gerotard Inc has patented all the processes involved and has joined with a number of major drug manufacturers to set up production and delivery facilities, which should be up and running within months worldwide.

And on it goes.
Let’s suppose this is how the announcement hits the world at large. There may have been rumors about serious progress on the longevity front, but ‘progress’ has been made steadily for a long time. Apart from some sensationalist journalism and the dire warnings of the Kass-crowd, this has become almost commonplace. Media attention tends to refocus very quickly on the irrelevant but eye-catching, and life-extension stuff is likely to fill in the gaps only at times when nothing suitably trivial but sensational is going on in the worlds of celebrity watching, politics, natural disasters or serial killing sprees.
So, all of a sudden we have this announcement, which is likely to be greeted with a lot of skepticism from some quarters, sensationalist glee by others and a sigh of relief from the immortalist/transhumanist community. Governmental agencies may be caught by surprise and with their pants down, because this isn’t necessarily the kind of thing they’d keep tabs on but should have. Gerotard Inc in turn was careful not to do anything to attract governmental attention, for fear of losing control over what will surely be an immensely lucrative business, with massive returns for its investors. One of Gerotard’s devices for concealing the full scope of their activities was to relocate critical research to a small Gerotard subsidiary, CELSIG, in Australia; which ostensibly was engaged in the development and production of micro-chip-based DNA classification systems, the hardware for which was manufactured in China.
It took Wall Street a few days to take note of the effects of Gerotard’s announcement. There were some stock movements, but nothing sufficiently major to warrant a mention or raise alarms. Gerotard shares crept up as existing investors attempted to buy out others.
Then the crap hit the fan. The US Justice Department announced that it had closed down Gerotard’s offices and facilities and was conducting an investigation into activities suspected of being criminally fraudulent. All trading in Gerotard stock was suspended. The matter assumed sufficient interest to hit the media-big-time.
The plot thickened as it became clear that only one of Gerotard’s executives had been arrested, mainly because the others had left the US shortly before the original announcement. Gerotard’s CEO was released on a preposterous bail soon after his arrest. He promptly gave a press conference in which he stunned everybody by presenting the US government and, as he put it, “any other national or private organization that cares to stand in the way of the most significant development in human history”, with an ultimatum.
“The Justice Department has until noon tomorrow to drop all charges against Gerotard, its affiliates and any of its executives and staff. If they don’t, a certain website will go ‘live’, which contains all records of over ten years of research, patents, and theoretical and technical information. These comprehensive data will be available to anybody with an internet connection, anywhere in the world. The charges under which I was being held are false and were laid purely to allow the government to obtain exactly this information. They weren’t able to do this, because in anticipation of such actions, Gerotard has long transferred the most critical data to other places. As of noon tomorrow, unless Gerotard is cleared of all charges and allowed to continue to conduct its business in the usual manner and without governmental interference, the world will know more about our research and its therapeutic applications than the US Government does now.”
How that story continues…
Go, figure.
In another scenario, Gerotard doesn’t publicly announce its developments, but plays it safe nonetheless; knowing that Homeland Security have far ranging powers to declare matters as being concerned with ‘National Security’, and that, for any number of reasons, the ready availability of a low-cost effective anti-ageing and rejuvenation treatment is definitely a major candidate. Instead, Gerotard spreads its activities across the world, and especially into countries with minimal regulations on medical matters. It also takes pains to keep research and biotechnological development separate. Such compartmentalization allows it to fly under the radar until the technology is ready and has been extensively tested on human subjects. Most of Gerotard’s staff have no idea what they’re really working on.
Instead of a public announcement, Gerotard relies on word-of-mouth advertising. Like in John Wyndham’s classic The Trouble With Lichen or Perry’s Immune Response, the ‘clientele’ also is not fully aware of the full implications of the treatments that are curing their cancer or slowly removing the signs of ageing. Still, the treatment is expensive and limited to those who can afford it, though $10,00 a pop seems like a small price to pay. Wouldn’t you re-mortgage your house in an instant or max out your credit card, if you could live forever in good health and vigor?
The numbers of treated-ones grow, until by default they do get noticed.
And that story continues as well…
There are many variations on these themes, plus a gazillion more. The point I’m trying to make is not that I think one or the other is a likely scenario, but merely that when this finally goes down, nobody—and I mean ‘nobody’—is going to have a plan of how to handle the consequences. That’s because human affairs, as history has demonstrated ad nauseam, do not follow patterns that can be predicted with any degree of accuracy. There are no ‘general principles’ here. Circumstances are always too ‘particular’ to allow the ‘general’ to apply. It’s like in war. The moment the first bullets start flying, the best planning goes out the window, and it’s a matter of adjusting one’s sights to a highly mobile target or targets.
There may be a goal—in this instance that might be to take humankind beyond the Ephemeral stage—but what path we’re taking and what way-markers we’re likely to follow…
When this finally goes down, humankind will need guides; desperately so. Not theoreticians and principle- or ideal-mongers, but people who understand what’s going on, who are mentally prepared for what’s going on, and who are willing to dedicate themselves wholly to making sure that things don’t go tits-up.
That means that these people need to do some serious work beforehand. They need to be scenario-anticipators. The social equivalent of Generals: tactical and strategic planners, capable of stepping in when the time comes and helping!
Do we have any such among the community of those we might expect to be the only ones qualifying as ‘prepared’: immortalists, transhumanists, scientists at the forefront of longevity research, futurologists?
The grim answer is that if there are, they’re in deep cover. I’ve yet to hear of anyone who would qualify.
And where does that leave the future?

#22 till

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Posted 11 November 2008 - 09:14 PM

I was reminded of the Immortalist Mannifesto for some reason: http://www.immortalism.com/


BTW, just wanted to say something about this Elixxir fellow. I came across him a while ago, and pretty much feel about it now as I did then, which is...ahh, I think maybe better I don't say it. Read between the lines.

I've heard this crap all before, especially from the heebee-jeebee crowd (Rebirthers, Project Mind people, etc etc), and I've looked into these things and tried to believe some of them; quite without being able to fool myself for long enough to write out a cheque—though I've corresponded with some of them. My rule is that whenever someone charges bizarre amounts of money for what amounts to suspect and hard-to-reality-check 'treatments' it's time to take cover. Call me a fool, but I believe in what it says on my emortalists.com website about providing a 'public service'. That's what this needs to be all about. Emortals have no need for obscene wealth, intended mainly for their own benefit. Only Ephemerals do.

Also, I'm happy to stake my life on my good sense of priorities (dietary and life-style wise) as well as what I see as a soon-coming-to-fruition (hopefully in time for me!) effort that's been going on ever since 'science' began—and long before that. The main thing is, I think, to live with a state of mind that does indeed start with NEVER EVER GIVE UP. Not until your last-ever heartbeat (or whatever substitutes, in case your heart is supplemented or replaced by machinery) and your last-ever conscious thought.

#23 till

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Posted 12 November 2008 - 08:38 PM

Space, the Final Frontier

Fact: If humankind keeps its eggs in the basket called ‘Earth’, it will be wiped out of existence long before anything goes seriously wrong with the sun, the galaxy or the universe.
Yeah, I know, by some definitions of ‘fact’ this one really isn’t one. LudwigWittgenstein, one of the few philosophers I respect, stated that (as translated by Pear/McGuiness): “What is the case — a fact — is the existence of states of affairs.” And global Armageddon as a consequence of human stupidity or contingencies like a planet-killer, or at least atmosphere-killer, asteroid, hasn’t happened yet; not at the time I’m writing this. It’s possible that they will between me finishing this and you potentially reading it, of course…
However, it is a fact that really bad things have happened in the past, and between their occurrence there would have been plenty of time for something like humans to evolve, as is the state of affairs right now. But the eggs were in the basket and the basket got nuked. Not good. Not good at all. Especially, you might say, if the planet is at least partially populated by creatures that or live for longer than just a few measly orbits around the sun.
Another fact: No matter what happens, and even if we spread the eggs around a bit, many of them will stay in the basket called ‘Earth’ and will be nuked into oblivion together with it.
That’s not good either, but it seems to me that right now the situation parallels that confronted by those not wanting to be subjected to our obligatory death sentence and eventual execution. In both cases we’re dealing with a lack of choice, coming about as a consequence of other choices. In the case of death, we do stupid things like choose to support the spending of tens of billions of dollars on vapid events like the Olympics, instead of investing the same moneys into people’s health and welfare and survival. In the case of space-exploration…well, same thing. Think of what the $40+ billion could have achieved if they had been invested into space-flight technology. The moneys expended on the last Olympics worldwide would have covered NASA’s entire International Space Station budget for the ten years from 1992-2005, give or take a few billion.
Not that I’m certain that the ISS is the best way to spend space-exploration money, or that NASA or any other agency in any other nation is all that good at the planning and tasking of space research, but that’s beside the point; said ‘point’ being that I’m writing this in a year where the moneys spent on social inanities—of which the Olympics surely must rank at #1—would have been sufficient to improve the human condition worldwide. And, yes, I agree: the almost $600 billion spent on the Iraq war at the time I’m writing this make the Olympic expenditure appear modest and benign by comparison. And one might rightly argue that if someone hadn’t started that war and instead used the money somewhere else, then we’d probably all be emortal by now. True enough. But that doesn’t make the waste of money on the Olympics any more justified. About all you can say for it, is that it wasn’t used to kill people. Not directly anyway.
I know a lot of people aren’t going to like this, but it really, honestly isn’t meant to be a justification for going to war! Ever! But if that killer asteroid comes along, the technology that just may give us a chance to blast it or divert it would have been directly derived from the apparent perennial desire of groups of people trying to kill each other as effectively as possible. Take that for a grim irony! Maybe you don’t like that that’s the way things are, but right now they are. Period.
But suppose, just for the sake of the narrative, that the species had surplus disposable income, which it is willing to spend on space-exploration. What should it be spent on and what is it likely to bring, in terms of benefits? Or, to begin with, why should we?
‘For the sake of the survival of the species,’ is the usual argument, and it’s a start.
But then we come to the next question: What’s the point of the survival of the species?
The answer for Absurdists like me is: There is no point.
Then why spend gazillions of hard-earned dollars on space-exploration type things when these could instead be used to improve overall quality of human life—which includes, one might argue, the development of universal Emortality.
The answer seems obvious: Because if we’re emortal, then dying huddled on this planet while we get nuked by some cosmic or man-made disaster…that seems really, really stupid. And even if we’re just Ephemerals that’s no reason to call it quits-by-default on the cosmic scene. In this indifferent and meaningless universe, we have the choice to make what we are and might become into than just a passing fad in cosmic history.
Still, that doesn’t seem to answer the question as to why we should.
Well, maybe then just because we can. Because we’re here, so there!
I can give you a more personal reason, too. Do you have children, or plan to? Do you have loved ones you care about? Do you want these people—loved ones, descendants, friends—to continue to exist? Do you want yourself to continue to exist? Do you want to create a world where there is a choice about the continuance of one’s existence?
If the answers to these questions are affirmative, then there you have your reasons. And if you can’t figure out why you should care about the species as a whole, then consider this: that as a species we stand and as a species we fall. If you and your loved ones will survive. it’s going to be because of the species and society and what it can accomplish. You want anyone to survive: same thing. Live with it.
We will live or die as a species.
Our personal survival and that of the species as a whole are inextricably linked.
Period.
End of the ‘reason’ discussion’.
Note that I was not necessarily talking about our survival as inhabitants of Planet Earth. Earth—much as I love it, and though as it has given us birth and we are connected to it by many millions of years of natural history—is just a place. Think of it as a kind of ‘super-home-town’. It’s where all the people you know live and do stuff. But it’s still just a place.
It’s possible that because I’m of a gypsy-esque disposition I tend not to fret a lot about ‘leaving home town’. I left the place where I was born at the age of 20, and as of recent I’ve moved again, after living in a place for almost 20 years. It wasn’t easy, but you just do it. No matter how much you love the place, when it’s time to go you gotta go. Simple as that.
I know, I know. It isn’t that simple for everyone. People have roots and some go very deep; so deep that if you pull them out you’ll kill the person. And humankind’s roots in Planet Earth are very deep indeed. Personally speaking I’d find it excruciatingly difficult to pull up mine and just head off into ‘space’, to strange places that will never ever be able to replace what I’ll lose by removal from Earth. I’ve tried to capture some of these issues in the novels of the Tethys series. Even if we should find another world to live on that provides us with a benign habitat, it will never be Earth. It will never be ‘home’. It can’t be. Even the children born there will sense its strangeness.
Or maybe not?
Maybe. For what is ‘home’? What is ‘familiar’ and what generates the sensation of ‘belonging’?
Human beings are incredibly adaptable. I really don’t know—as nobody does, because it’s all speculation—what kind of relationship one might establish to an environment that is not one of our native planet. It might be better than we fear. For example, I grew up in Germany, not far from the Dutch border, a long distance from the ocean and in the typical climate of that part of Europe. Yet the places on Earth I find resonating the most with me are nothing like what I was ‘familiar’ with. Maybe the strangest resonance is the one I feel with the Australian Northern Territory. It’s been there since first I traveled through it in the early 1970s. It was like a homecoming when I returned there for a holiday in 2007. Could there anything be more ‘different’ between what I grew up with and what ‘works’ for me? Practicalities of life and job still prevent me from actually going to live there, but one day…
No, methinks that maybe there is no intrinsic problem about pulling up your roots and going somewhere else, provided the motivation is there. It’s just that for many people that motive will never be sufficient, and their roots will be too deep.
But ultimately that is their choice. And I believe that we ought to work to give those who want it the opportunity to choose; just like we ought to give ourselves the opportunity to choose between living and dying.
‘Space’, the stars and whatever planets we may find there, are the only places we can go in order to spread our eggs wider then we have so far. That’s just a physical fact.
In order to accomplish this we need the means to do so; meaning we need ‘the technology’.
The most significant issues with space travel are associated with its biological consequences, and the most currently-intractable one of those is the effect of radiation on space travelers. We can, in principle solve almost every other problem associated with space-travel. Given enough funds, we could build huge ships that could, albeit very slowly, travel to other stars and spend many generations in space. Issues of weightlessness can be overcome by using centrifugal forces to simulate gravity. Large-enough ships could have extensive, complex and self-sustaining life-support systems. Endless science fiction has been written relating to such enterprises, some of it not taking recourse to novel methods of ‘space drive’, but conjecturing instead of that we might be able to do it with technology available today an extrapolated some years into the future..
What we need is really simple, though the devil, as usual, hides in the details: a source of energy to power and propel our spaceships, as well as a self-sustaining and fairly catastrophe-resistant habitat for the passengers. An excellent example for what’s required is ‘Spaceship Earth’; though, like the human body, it may have some serious deficiencies that clever design and engineering might just be able to improve upon.
‘Radiation’ is in a different league of problems. What comes at us from space is stuff that, in terms of the energies involved, dwarfs the Large Hadron Collider’s output. Our atmosphere and the Earth’s magnetic field shields us from much of this, but some of it does get through; not enough to do real harm, but it still can give us occasional problems—more so now, that our computer circuit technology has become as sophisticated as it has. ‘Cosmic rays’ as sources of failure of complex electronic equipment aren’t just freakish oddities anymore.
Once we’re ‘out there’, the atmosphere is gone, as is the magnetic field. Life up in the ISS is not healthy. Of course, once we’re out of the solar system, the sun’s lethal output will be very much attenuated; but there will come a time when we’ll be wanting to approach another star, which will almost certainly be a source of as much, if not more, very unhealthy particle and electromagnetic radiation.
There are two methods of coping with the ‘radiation’ issue: shielding and biological adaptation.
Right now, shielding methods that do an even half-assed job, would involve preposterous additions of mass to space-going ships. The one that’s being rediscovered now by engineers was first proposed in 1936 by, surprise!, a science fiction writer, John W. Campbell, in his story The Ultimate Weapon. On long voyages you’ll need lots of water. The more the better, really; for fuel and habitat support. So why not store the water on the outside of the ship and use it as a shield that way?
Still, we’re talking about a serious mass. However, if it’s needed anyway… It would be useful though if we could also find some less weighty solution for personal protection. There are materials, carbon at the forefront, that hold significant promise in that area. Yeah, I know, carbon is the favorite bashing-boy at the moment. But carbon is also the stuff we’re made of and next to hydrogen and oxygen is the most common element in our bodies. Carbon is also found in diamond, and there are some truly amazing materials, like Graphene, that promise a great deal for the future, and which make me suspect that we have barely scratched the surface of the potential of that amazing element, Carbon.
The second method of dealing with radiation is biological. Radiation damages cells and everything at the nucleotide level. If we, however, were to develop methods to deal more effectively with damaged cells and DNA—something that appears essential in the context of the emortalist project anyway!—then that, possibly in conjunction with better radiation-protection methods, would probably solve the gravest of the technical problems associated with serious space exploration and eventual space migration of large numbers of people.
The bottom line to all this is that the technological issues associated with space migration can be overcome—even with contemporary technology. Itll cost a lot of money, but it can be done.
Another, more science-fiction-esque alternative concerns still-extant scientific insights into the nature of matter, energy, space and time. Stephen Hawking remarked that the LHC might provide such insights one day, and maybe soon; but at the time of writing the LHC is not even doing any serious particle smashing. If it so happens—and I’d be delighted if we did, but right now it’s like a belief in some non-existent deity, in that there’s no serious reason why there will be—that we find out some now-magical-appearing way to traverse large distances in short spans of time, possibly the blink of an eyelid, such as, say in Gordon R. Dickson’s classic Mission to Universe (still one of my favorite exploration novels), then the whole game-plan would change. Discovering that kind of thing would almost be as significant as the introduction of Emortality treatments.
But right now we have to think slow ships, lots of money and time invested, making the Pyramids appear like casual afternoon past-times, and very few people—compared to he number of humans clamoring for attention and resource expenditure—involved in the enterprise.
Which should make it clear to anybody that the real obstacle to space exploration and migration isn’t really technological; or only indirectly so, in the sense that our limited technology results in the requirement for ridiculous expenditure. The real obstacle is that we’re basically asking for the diversion of huge amounts of money to send off a comparatively tiny group of explorers on a voyage from which they will, for all practical purposes for Planet Earth, never return. When I say ‘tiny’, I mean ‘tiny’. Even if it were a few thousand, it would still be ‘tiny’. Very.
Can anybody really see a nation or a conglomerate of nations banding together to spend something like the current yearly budget of the US on an enterprise of this nature? If you can, dream on! And here lies the true immovable mountainous obstacle.
One might argue that maybe private enterprise could undertake such a project much more efficiently, and that’s something to consider. But private enterprise needs a motive, and for them surely sending off a bunch of human seeds into the universe, never to return or to render any profit…
I can’t see it, and neither can you. If you can, you really need to learn to distinguish between fact and fiction.
So, friends and fellow Emortalists, the prospects look glum in the space-colonization area. The grim consequences of that are that, even when we eventually, maybe soon, succeed in making men emortal—on any scale—we’ll still have the whole issue of being potentially threatened by extinction-through-contingency-and-unpreparedness. And when Planet Earth goes bye-bye, so will the Emortals.
It sucks.
Is there a solution, or am I really going to end this section on such a dismal note?
Well, there is a solution, a very hypothetical one. But its my business to exercise my imagination and explore scenarios and there are some that will offer hope—though that will definitely be confined to a small number of people; even smaller than the ‘tiny’ one I mentioned earlier.
It might work like this:
So, suppose we have a fairly large number of Emortals, people who have received a treatment that will bring them to ‘escape velocity’, walking the Earth. It’s past the time where it’s all hypothetical and it has actually happened. But not all people are on board yet and won’t be for a long time; not even in the developed nations of the world where the treatment is readily available.
The Emortals still are an isolated group, because the whole thing hasn’t really caught on yet and many people by and large still look upon it with suspicion, and often mistrust and loathing. In a sense, the Emortals are an elite, who among themselves count a lot of very rich people, as is inevitable. There is also a significant coherence between them; a community of purpose. As such they actually band together to undertake this enterprise. As more and more people join the emortalist camp, more and more free themselves of assuming myopic positions, and the camp grows; ultimately giving the enterprise sufficient momentum, so it continues along its path. Since the people involved by and large are among those prepared to actually embark on the voyage—non-Emortals being excluded by default—their personal interest and the larger purpose of the enterprise coincide and continue to do so. Because of all this, ultimately the ship will sail. Or maybe there will be more than one. Maybe there’ll be a small fleet that sails together, acting as mutual protection and backup in case of mishaps. A bunch of little baskets!
The elitist nature of the many-faceted Emortalist ‘community’ is an important element in getting the enterprise started. And it might get started fairly soon down the track.
So, I think that there’s hope. There’s also hope, of course, that we really don’t know everything important there is to know about the physical universe, and that there are ways to cheat the cosmic distance/time limits and constraints. I’m hoping for the latter, while suspecting that the limitations probably are solid and insuperable.
In any case, and to bookend this section, the one thing we can be sure about is that if we really want to live forever, or at least a very, very long time, we need to get our butts off Planet Earth; like seriously far away and to places where one day we can establish a new ‘home’. Meaning that we need to focus on what matters and not waste our energy on irrelevancies. As long as we continue doing that, we’re doing little else but setting ourselves up to fail.
As I finish writing this, an article in the journal Nature captures my attention, about an object called WR 104, which lies about 8000 light years from us. That seems like a nice long distance and why should we worry? Well, it’s a rather strange star, which has a good chance of going supernova in the not too distant future—talking centuries or millennia, rather than millions of years. Also, it has certain attributes that put us very much in harm’s way if it does explode, because it looks like we’re right along the path of what may well be a highly focused beam of high-energy radiation emitted from the explosion. All of a sudden 8000 light years doesn’t look like a safe distance anymore.
I know that a lot of people, some of them very clever ones, have gone to great lengths to prove ‘mathematically’ that catastrophes of wiping-out-the-species proportions aren’t likely enough for us to lose sleep over. All these calculations, just like those coming to the opposite conclusion, are (a) statistical and (b) based on data that are invariably selected to prove whatever point the prover is trying to prove.
Still, no point in losing any sleep over it. And, let’s face it, even if you do think that there’s going to be some serious crap coming our way in a few hundred of thousand years or so… I mean, we’re all going to die, sooner or later, right? Right?
Well, maybe, and hopefully it’ll be ‘later’ and very optional as well. Even Heinlein’s ‘Senior’ from Time Enough For Love was struggling to find meaning in life when the book started. That was after some 2,500 years, which is a fairly long time, as you’ll admit, yes?
But it doesn’t have to be tomorrow, or in a century or even a millennium. Which is why the likes of me do occasionally wake up during the darkest part of the night, when one’s thoughts also are tuned into the darkest recesses of one’s apprehensions, and, yes, I do lose sleep over it. I know it sounds ridiculous; but, admit it, you, too, lose sleep occasionally at those hours, when the full extend of possible personal or wide-ranging calamity enters your thoughts and bounces around, amplified with every new thought, until sleep just won’t happen for that night.
I suppose there are many people who don’t lose sleep over things like this. But you? If you’re reading this and don’t have the occasional adult night-terror, I don’t know how you function.
How many reasons do you need to start working in some way to help getting our asses of this lovely planet of ours? Or do you want to be the crew member that goes down heroically with the ship, for whatever obscure reason? Do you love it that much, are so co-dependent on it, that you feel you couldn’t live, or be human, without it?
‘Space’ isn’t just the final frontier. It’s our only hope of long-term survival as a species. If you think that this species of ours is worthy of survival—for whatever reason, and I don’t care which, or whatever values you care you contrive to make it so!—then it’s time to stop thinking ‘science fiction’ and making it ‘science’ and otherwise ‘fact’. From the perspective of Emortals, large scale emigration of humans to other worlds, in and beyond the solar system, isn’t just an option, but an imperative.

#24 till

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Posted 12 November 2008 - 08:59 PM

Where Are the Emortals?

Some years back—well, quite a few years back, during the late 70s—I got my first pocket calculator: an HP34C, which did fancy things like numerical integration. I was not too long out of university then, where I had been studying physics and mathematics. I used my pretty new little toy to do some interesting calculations. Unfortunately, during my many travels and house shifts, I’ve lost the pieces of paper on which I kept my notes and results, plus the HP34C ‘programme’ I set up to calculate how many people above certain ages one might expect to be kicking around at any given time. ‘Mathematically' speaking, that is.
The action was prompted in no small measure because I read a novel by Mack Reynolds called ‘Eternity’, in which it was indeed proposed that multi-centenarians are indeed walking among us. This was also the first time I came across the term ‘Emortal’, and I was instantly hooked by it. It made sense and expressed precisely what I was searching for, but what had no real ‘term’, because Alan Harrington followed the general trend and used ‘immortal’.
Anyway, there I was fitting distribution curves to actual population-age data and integrating, meaning calculating the areas under, the asymptotic tail ends, that’s the parts of the curves where they go almost to zero but never quite get there. Said areas under the curves represent the number of people within a certain age range to be alive.
Now, I must caution that this is a mathematical game, fraught with many pitfalls when trying to apply it to reality; and especially when it comes to biological models. Much depends on the distribution curve chosen and the numbers entered for curve-fitting. Still, who know whether behind the fun lurks at least ‘some’ reality?
Keeping in mind all the uncertainties and provisos mentioned, I recall that the numbers of people far exceeding what’s currently accepted at ‘maximum human lifespan’—something like 120 years—came out to anything from a hundred to thousands, depending on where you set the limits. There were very few Methuselahs; say, 800+ years old. But in the 100-500 range we have more than just a handful.
As I said, this is ‘mathematically’ speaking; and there’s lies, damn lies and mathematics.
Still, I am a writer of fiction who is inclined to use numbers to at least do basic reality checks on anything that can be reality-checked by numbers. That kind of thing got me into deep water very early on in my life. I had to participate in class-prayer—as was usual in German primary schools, though I don’t know if it still is—every morning; with a class of kids, who apparently had no problem uttering the words [translated] “…God, lay your hand on every child” over and over again without the obvious troubling existential questions. Like how could God do that? Did he have one big hand so dexterous that he somehow managed to position in such a way that it touched the head of every child? If not, then how many hands did he have? And let’s not get into other troubling possibilities that I was too young and innocent to consider then.
I did ask how many hands God had. The adults were amused. The story was often retold to indicate…well, I don’t know what it was supposed to prove, but there must have been something. It could have been told with pride as in “Wasn’t he a clever boy?”, or as a put-down: “Wasn’t he a silly boy?” Or something in between: “Wasn’t he a clever but naïve boy, who hopefully now knows better?”
The adults’ answers predictably failed to satisfy. Adults’ answers to children seldom satisfy, since they’re usually condescending cop-outs. “Just wait until you get older; then you’ll understand.”
Back to HP34Cs and curve-integration. I still sometimes wonder, just how silly and purely ‘mathematical’ these calculations really were. I mean, what if there are people out there already who are far older than anybody would believe? What if they do actually number in the hundreds and maybe thousands?
I know, I know, it’s a favorite theme of some types of imaginative literature. Nothing much new about it, really. Mack Reynolds’ Eternity is my favorite example.
One thing’s for sure: if they are around, they’re hiding well. For good reasons, no doubt. But I wonder if—purely speculating here, folks!—if those reasons are still valid; especially those relating to them being afraid of everybody and sundry wanting a piece of them to wrench the secret of their longevity from them.
Nowadays, the grim investigatory methods from once-upon-a-time have been superseded by far more sophisticates techniques. Today we’d want to have a look at their genes to start with, which would probably give us a profound insight into what constitutes the basic components of biological Emortality. There may be other factors, but I think we’re past the primitive cut-them-up stage.
Other issues do, of course, still loom, and would rightly prevent such individuals from coming forward.
Like, there’s the question of how they would be received, by those ‘in charge’ and the general populace alike. The social issues are far more serious these days than the scientific ones.
I also wonder if these individuals are organized in any way. 'Eternity' supposed that they were, though I don’t think that they would really live in a single, geographically coherent, community. Far too dangerous, despite some distinct advantages. All eggs in one basket and all that. On the other hand, being in isolated positions like the emortal ‘Sareens’ in my Tethys novels, wouldn’t be good either. Community supports.
I know: I talk about these Emortals almost as if they were real, when there is no evidence I know of that they are. But that’s cool. Story-tellers devise scenarios to explore possibilities, and this is one of them. Only way to see where they lead is to follow them as if they were true.
I’m also wondering if what stops any existing Emortals isn’t fear of exposure but far more cogent considerations. Some of those I might disagree with, but I respect the fact that people might have them. Indeed, this is one of the issues I’m still dealing with in the Tethys series. As yet it is unresolved—mainly because I’m not sure how to resolve it, though I’m getting there.
The ‘cogent considerations’ might have led these people to conclude that it wouldn’t be a good idea, right here and right now, to let longevity loose upon the human race. Never mind the science; it’s the ‘society’ aspect that’s at stake here, and how this will impact on humanity’s future.
There are troubling questions here that need to be answered. For example, when we do this magical calculation that says “if we save 100,000+ people a day from dying, then we will save 100,000 x 365 = 36+ million people a year”, is that really the end of it? I know that the notion of ‘saving’ people from death is a powerful one. It appeals to our compassion; the Immortalist/Transhumanist need to have a ‘mission’ that appears to go over and above their members’ desire not to die. Just imagine: saving all those people! Nick Bostrom’s Fable of the Dragon Tyrant is the prime example of this line of thought, which can be summarized thus: “Every day we delay the introduction of Emortalism we kill another 100,000 people.” A powerful imperative, to be sure.
But…
Suppose that, all gut-feeling aside, your assessment of the likely consequences of introducing the longevity-thing to the world as outlined in a previous section is such that you’d conclude that in the short-to-medium term that kind of action would actually kill more people than it saves…
How? Simply by the consequences of its introduction. It isn’t that far-fetched to conjecture significant social strife, including of the international type, starting up as a consequence of introducing longevity to he world—with attendant results including large amounts of people dead that would otherwise still have been alive. That will probably be different people to those that would be ‘saved’ by Gerotard intervention. But the bottom line, ‘numbers of people dead’—which is the argument; and not which people are dead!—might well favor scenarios in which Emortality is not introduced; at least not in such a way as to just ‘save’ your 100,000 a day.
But, one might argue, we don’t know what the consequences are going to be, and they might well be entirely benign!
Exactly! And they might not be.
Who’s to decide? Who can be relied upon to predict with the greatest degree of reliability or credibility?
I’m not going to weigh in on this, because I don’t know; and if I did have an opinion I probably wouldn’t tell you. But I have a little exercise for you, which, if you’re a person capable of being honest with yourself, might want to try out. It’s in the form of a thought-experiment.
If it makes it easier, think of it as a story, told about someone else but you. But just try to be honest. No need to tell anyone else what you think or how you decide. It’ll just be your very own little secret.
It’s this. Suppose you yourself are an Emortal, having had some treatment meted out to yourself, or else just being that way naturally inclined.
Suppose you also know how to implement your kind of longevity for everybody else; say by a simple article on the details that you could publish on the internet, without anyone ever knowing it was you.
Suppose there would be no terrible personal consequences associated with such publicizing.
Suppose you could sneak in your kind of longevity for those dear to you, without them knowing about it for a long time to come, so that there’s no danger of things getting out that way.
Suppose you had done some thinking about the large-scale consequences of introducing this knowledge to the world at large.
Remember that your own life and that of your loved ones, and dear friends if you wanted to, is not at stake anymore. Problem solved on those fronts.
So, simple question: What would you do?
Publish that internet article?
Or not?
Let the genie out of the bottle in this world—as it is right now!—or hold it back until…well, whenever?
Don’t forget, you can always still do it later. But once it’s out, it’s out!
Besides, science might take matters out of your hands—or maybe your longevity is the product of science, in which case someone else 'in the know' might relieve you of the necessity to make the decision.
What would you do?
Think you know?
Cool!
Let’s make the situation considerably muddier. After all, that’s my business as a story-teller.
Suppose you could not sneak in longevity for your loved ones, and that there’s just one gel-cap for you. And it’s not like you could opt to give that one to your child instead; that choice is not open, because the contents of the gel-cap are tailored to you, that being the nature of the treatment. Someone gave you this thing and convinced you that it’ll ‘work’; no doubt abut the efficacy.
You wonder how they tailored it to your genetic makeup? Well, remember that full-spectrum blood test you had done as a part of your two-yearly health check?
As a condition of giving you the gel-cap and thereby entry into a very limited circle of people, they ask you not to tell anyone. Still, ultimately they can’t really stop you if you wanted to; it’s not like they’re going to kill you if you do. That’s not the kind of people they are. You were picked for good reasons, which include that you’re considered to have ‘good judgment’.
Said ‘good judgment’ would lead you to consider this:
First of all, if the treatment’s effects are gradual and reasonably subtle, including the ‘rejuvenation’ part, who’s going to believe you? What are you going to do? Who are you going to contact and alert regarding this? Are you going to talk to your doctor? And what are you going to tell him or her? “Hey, I’ve just been made Emortal, and I’m not going to be sick anymore, so could you please find out for me how that’s done?”
Secondly, there’s your spouse and your children; dear friends; parents; siblings. Are you going to tell them? Some might actually believe you, but at what price? Would you really want them to be aware of this? Think of what it’ll do to your life and your relationships with them! And then…well, after all, they won’t know for quite a while to come, and maybe—or so you’ll hope—you can convince your benefactors to include them as well.
Besides, why tell them? It’ll only hurt them as well. Like your spouse might wonder what prompted you to swallow that pill, when you knew that s/he wasn’t going to get one, too. What does that say, s/he’ll wonder, about all your love and devotion and all that? How could you do such a thing?!
Still, your good sense tells you that no harm is actually being done. To the contrary. After all, it’ll be reasonably certain that you’re not going to get sick, so that’s an expense the family budget won’t have to bear.
Also, you definitely won’t have to ‘retire’, at least not within your spouse’s lifetime, and thus can continue working and providing for the family’s welfare. A lot of ‘older people’ nowadays keep on working to avoid becoming ‘pensioners’ or because they lost their retirement funds in bad speculations on fickle stock markets. So, not that anybody’s going to notice anything unusual about that. Also, because your brain is likely to be healthier and therefore more agile than that of the average ageing human, you’ll have a definite advantage. Besides, you won’t resent not being able to retire, as so many older folks do, because they are forced to work until the last years of their lives because of economic circumstances.
So, it’s win-win, right? The only price you have to pay is “Don’t Tell!”.
And what’s the harm? Just suppose you did not take the pill. What would change? Nothing at all, except that you, too, would get old/sick and die, and that you’d actually be handicapped by potential illnesses and decrepitude and so on.
Oh, and to muddy waters some more: you can’t just take the pill and not swallow it, hoping that you’ll get time to make up your mind in due course. It’s a ‘live’ preparation that need to get into your blood-stream a.s.a.p. Expiry date: one day from delivery. No second offer forthcoming.
Muddying some more: suppose your spouse is a wannabe-Emortalist like yourself…
What are you going to do? Like Baron Münchhausen in the 1943 movie, are you going to say “Both of us or none; I love you so much that I’d rather die with you than live without you.”; thus effectively sacrificing your life for…well, what exactly?
I hope you’re getting my point here: The Devil’s in the Details.
I know that some will object to such thought-experiments, arguing that they’re so unlikely as to be ludicrous; suitable maybe for a story, but hardly likely to actually be ‘real’.
Well, maybe the particular details of the scenarios outlined above are imagined; but the underlying points are not. It’s not just that the devil’s in the details. The Emortality-introduction business, whatever happens if and when it finally is possible and on a large scale, is going to have decision-making consequences at the personal levels of millions, possibly billions, of human beings, that will rival anything you’re just been presented with.
This isn't a game, folks. The only thing more serious you'll come across is your own physical extinction.

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Posted 13 November 2008 - 08:46 AM

Engineering Emortality

Aubrey de Grey is probably the best known immortalist face outside the immortalist movement. He’s also a bit crazy and definitely what’s sometimes called a ‘personality’. He has some very interesting ideas, many of which you can find in his book Ending Aging. His main contribution to the Emortalist enterprise is the notion that physical longevity can be achieved through engineering, without waiting until all the fundamental questions about aging have been answered. We know, he argues, about many of the things that go wrong in the body and its cells, which make us become old and decrepit and die. Let’s tackle them one by one—or maybe a few of them in one fell swoop, if that’s possible—and get things done that way. As time goes on, we’re going to get better and better at this, and as new knowledge comes online, we can make use of that as well.
This approach, known as developing and applying ‘Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence’ (SENS), may be the most promising one to get even the likes of me into ‘escape velocity’ mode. The long term issues can be tackled in due course, but first it’s kind of important not to die tomorrow!
De Grey puts forth some interesting propositions, some of which dovetail with those advanced by Michael Fossel in, inter alia, his book Reversing Human Ageing. There are a number of specific targets, from ‘death-genes’ to telomeres, that definitely merit attention, and which appear to hold out the promise of a satisfactory degree of success in the not-too-distant future.
I can relate to the ‘engineering’ approach, possibly because part of my own academic background is in physics and, mostly electronic, engineering. The SENS approach in many ways borrows from the kind of scenario in Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love or Haldeman’s Buying Time: periodically, the body requires an overhaul at the cellular and genetic level; so that’s what we’ll do. With time and experience we’re going to get better and better at this, ultimately being in a position to extend human life indefinitely. You’ll probably notice that this wouldn’t result in an Immortality-in-a-Gel-Capsule scenario. Or, maybe I should say ‘not immediately so’.
While I believe in the merits of the SENS approach, that doesn’t mean that I agree with some of de Grey’s propositions, which I consider ‘interesting’, but not in line with the complexity of the issues involved. It also lacks what you might call a conceptual backbone; what in story-telling is sometimes called a ‘spine’. That’s like a central theme, and an approach around which people can gather to pool their resources. Right now, it’s still much like the bio-medical research community as a whole: all working on aspects of the problem, but lacking a coherent thread to focus their resources on.
SENS tries to make best use of whatever is available, and there’s lots of very, very promising stuff out there and more coming. But, as history has shown, a concerted focus—as long as it isn’t a focus away from the direction in which one should be going; a moot point!—has almost always brought faster results than those produced by a community without such focus.
With such a complicated subject, can there be a focus of research that would be useful for SENS? Could there be a conceptual spine? A loose, sufficiently non-specific or unproductively constraining, and yet coherent theoretical framework that could serve to gather all the available research in a matrix, which, as it fills up, may well reveal what needs to be done and how?
I think there may be a useful approach in that area. It would aim at a therapeutic target of ‘continuous action’, rather than the ‘periodic renewal’ approach. That’s because prevention and maintenance is, to my mind, a much better approach—and also one that would make it much more practical to extend the therapy to large numbers of people.
The approach proceeds from the following basic assumptions—all of which qualify as ‘researched’ or ‘justified’ assumptions, and which are really a part or a consequence of, accepted biogenetic knowledge.

(1) Cellular behavior is determined partially by the ‘genetic’ components of the cell, and partially by the matrix in which the cell exists.
(2) Every cell has markers, a ‘signature’ if you will that can be used to identify it uniquely and distinguish it from every other cell.
(3) The genetic components of a cell can be manipulated.

The most sensible technology based on these assumptions is one which allows continuous monitoring of a range of target cells, a range that can be expanded as time goes on, and ‘fixing’ them as required.
At the most basic level that could be applied to cells that are either cancerous or ageing due to telomeric effects. In the first instance, often there’s telomerase where there shouldn’t be, and the natural brakes on cell proliferation are defunct. In the latter, telomeres have been whittled down to the point where either they have made cell replication impossible, and/or else have been reduced so far that they expose dangerous genetic junk that creates cellular havoc, or have ceased to protect cross-linking and other undesirable processes.
It’s that kind of thing I’m thinking about. The situation is going to be considerably more complicated, but this is just to illustrate the principle of the approach.
Several essential pieces of information are required to allow appropriate cellular manipulation: identification and modification.
‘Identification’ requires 1) determination of the genetic and organism-matrix related identify of the cell (e.g. ‘is it genetically and by-placement a liver cell?’) and 2) the determination of the condition of the cell (e.g. ‘is it on its last legs and/or cancerous?’)
Once identified, we require a decision-engine (e.g. ‘if P-then Q-else if R-then S-else if T-then U-else V”) that decides what’s to be done next.
Once that decision has been made, we need the agent (e.g. a retrovirus, which may be a component of or carried by the agent) to have the means to take the required corrective actions.
I believe this kind of conceptual ‘thread’ might be used as a unifying device to focus research and biotechnological development in three different tracks.
(1) Cell identification and condition analysis.
(2) Therapeutic intervention determination.
(3) Therapeutic intervention.
The overarching goal would be to create a programmable agent, or set of agents, that can be used to perform the required functions.
Sometimes I also wonder—and I can only wonder, because I’m not an ‘expert’ in that area—if most of the information we require isn’t already available and just needs to be put together. De Grey is, of course, very good at this; but methinks we need more people who have his vision and also some serious background in medical informatics.
A few million dollars, some very clever and visionary emortalist-inclined researchers, some decent computing resources, and access to just about every medical research database in the world…
Who knows what could be done in the space of a few years?
Medical research is often a painstaking, slow and laborious affair—not to speak of the costs!—but it would indeed be productive, I think, to not always wait until the final clinical trials verify theory X to FDA approval status. Sometimes highly suggestive results, if they fit into a coherent matrix of other results, may well be flagged as ‘sufficiently reliable’ to allow models to progress, even without final experimental verification. Physics has been operating along those lines for a very long time, and it’s been spectacularly successful.
Why not tackle the most important human enterprise ever in the same bold manner?
Over nine billion dollars have already been spent on the Large Hadron Collider. How about spending a few paltry million on tackling death head-on, and with an unapologetic and unyielding agenda to win?

What We’d Rather Not Think About
What We Think About Instead


The Lifeboat Foundation (lifeboat.com) is a fascinating organization and an excellent source for a list of perceived threats to the species. A lot of those I agree with, while I find others currently irrelevant and others bordering on perspective-lacking hysteria. I’ll get back to their list of ‘threats’ in a moment. First though I’d like to make up a short list of threats, not to human survival per se, though they just might relate to that as well, but to the success of the emortalist project.
The first threat is the unresolved question: Who is to live and who decides who is to live?
This may seem like one of these “we’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it” things, but in truth it’s potentially explosive. It lies at the heart of something I’ve discussed before: how ‘democratic’ is this Emortality thing is going to be?
Let’s go back to the ‘just one pill’ scenario. Sounds like just about the most democratic variation on the theme. So, here’s a question for you. What about the serial-killer who used to torture his victims before killing them? He’s now in jail ‘for life’, because the society that judged him doesn’t believe in capital punishment.
So, he wants to be emortal now. Suppose he can afford to pay for the pill—of if he can’t, suppose he sues the authorities, claiming that depriving him of the treatment is tantamount to executing him by default. Or take any variation on this theme.
Of course, as a ‘serial killer’ he’s an extreme case. There’s a whole spectrum of ‘undesirables’ that we really might actually not want to share the future with us. I’m sure most readers of this know several people personally that they’d rather not have around for any longer than is absolutely necessary.
So what about ‘the right to life’? Are we going to have a completely new system of laws here covering all this? Should we? To whom do we entrust these matters? Our governments—elected or not? Where are we going to draw the line of what’s acceptable and who is acceptable as a decision-maker? What criteria are we going to apply to those ‘allowed’ to become emortal? What about people who defy the system and get it done anyway? How will they get dealt with?
Take this further and consider the consequences of all this for our precious liberal sense of ‘equality’. Can you even begin to imagine the social upheavals and disruptions this will cause?
The alternative is to take a hands-off approach and let everyone who can afford the treatment to get it. That would include, one might conjecture, a lot of people who can afford it, but have come by the cash required through less-than-savory means. Think drug dealers, big and small. Think those ‘legal’ white-collar criminals who ripped off people during the most recent world financial upheavals. Think anybody who might just go out and rob others in order to get the money to get the treatment.
If you’re going to have the democratic approach, then you have no option but to accept these people as members of our future just as much as the Einsteins and Mother Theresas. And they’re not just going to go away because of old-age attrition! You’ll have them around like forever!
The moment, however, that you’re starting to put constraints into place, and saying “this is OK, but that isn’t; this person is allowed to have life-extension but that one definitely not”, the whole Emortality business is going to become what’s quaintly called ‘regulated’. Given the profound emotional content of the issue, this is going to be traumatic, to say the least.
The easiest thing would be to apply some idealism here and saying “no matter what the consequences, this has to be a democratic thing.”
But the problems we’d create with that might be even worse. Because then we have to ask just what we are going to do with that serial killer. Lock him up forever? Hope that in due course he’ll ‘rehabilitate’? How much faith could one have in that? Would one really want such a creature let loose among other people again? What kind of a future are we trying to build if it’s riddled with long-lived child molesters, murderers, thieves and robbers, spouse- and child beaters, and the current broad spectrum of psychopaths of all colors and shades? I mean, it’s not like making these creeps emortal is going to make them into ‘nice’ people. Chances are that the contrary will be true, and they’ll just get worse and exhibit progressively more extreme behaviors.
The truth is that ‘bad’ human behavior is only partially, and possibly to a rather small part, due to the fact that man is mortal. Trying to link the two—in the line of an argument that proposes that curing the one, mortality, will also cure the other, a nasty and unpleasant disposition—is just as silly as joining ‘nobility’ to ‘mortality’; only this one’s the flip-side of that coin. Humans aren’t noble or ignoble because of mortality, and they won’t be noble or ignoble if mortality is removed from the equation either.
This whole issue is just the tip of an iceberg that actually impacts on the future of the species and the whole emortalist project. It casts grave doubts on the viability of the transitional phase between the ‘now’ and the great, bright future that transhumanists like to talk about.
But the bridge between the ‘now’ and the ‘then’ looks brittle and fragile, and the river it has to cross is treacherous and will swallow us without a trace if the bridge fails. Transhumanists tend to focus on the result and effectively dismiss the likelihood of serious problems along the way with some token acknowledgement that there probably will be significant difficulties—but then there’s some arm-waving assurance that these are surmountable and in the end it’ll all be all right, because this thing is so good for all of us that it’ll just have to be all right! Nobody appears to appreciate that it’s the bridge we have to cross first. First things first!
It’s not about ‘threats to mankind’ that’ll stop Emortalism from becoming wide-spread, but our apparent utter lack of appreciation that the resistance to such a change will be huge. Said ‘resistance’ doesn’t just express itself through, say, the words and actions of opponents to such a change; but also through the change’s direct, indirect and associated consequences. Some of those I’ve outlined above; like the social ramifications of having to consider just how democratic life-extension should be and who should control what, and if anybody should be allowed to control anything. There are a gazillion more. Just use your imagination.
The more significant and far-reaching a change, the stronger will be this kind of ‘consequential’ resistance; and in the case of Emortalism we’re talking about the biggest change in human history ever. You fill in the blanks.
Do present-day Immortalists/Transhumanists appear to be overly concerned?
Hardly.
Instead they waste their time on fretting over non-issues or issues they can’t actually do anything about.
A classic Non-Issue: ‘Hostile AI’.
An issue that one can’t really do anything about right now: ‘Global Warming’.
These are just two examples, but they kind of stand out because of their silliness.
‘Hostile-AI’ (HAI) is an oxymoron, created by people who can’t distinguish fiction from reality and who have no understanding whatsoever about the concepts they’re playing around with. It is based on an anthropomorphization of machinery, and especially complex machinery that does stuff we can’t actually follow anymore.
I can understand how that comes about. I’ve worked in IT for most of my working life, and sometimes I yearn back to the days when I could understand every logical step involved in, say, programming a simple microprocessor in assembly language; or, even further back, by flicking switches on a front panel and making it do its thing step by painful step, until the ‘programme’ was complete. Those were the days when you basically knew, with sufficient exactitude, what was going on inside that machine.
Nowadays, when I use a word-processor or graphics program, running on my preferred computing machinery—a Mac laptop running OS X—I have no idea anymore what goes on at the ‘lower’ levels of the software, and even less about what happens in the hardware. But has anything really changed? How? Just because we don’t ‘understand’ in detail the goings-on anymore, that doesn’t mean that things actually have changed in principle; that there is some profound difference between what was and what is. The changes are quantitative, not qualitative.
I know people get all heebee-jeebee about ‘information technology’, but at the heart of it it’s still switches, and there’s nothing on the horizon right now that is not switches. And the human brain is emphatically not just switches; as we’re beginning to find out with every new day in neural physiology research. That may or may not be significant; it’s difficult to tell right now. But it’s something we need to take into account when we confuse human and machine ‘minds’.
At the heart of the HAI-fallacy lies something called ‘intentionality’ and ‘motivation’ arising from context-of-existence. Every attribute of HAI that makes it ‘hostile’ is taken from human psychology and projected upon machinery. But the context is all wrong. Machines are not human, and they have no cause to have human motivation—not even if they’re ‘programmed to kill’. They might do us harm, if someone constructed a system whose programme included the instruction to kill all humans, and which also included instructions for self-preservation and replication in order to fulfill the programme’s main goal, namely to kill humans.
But that’s not HAI! It’s humans programming machines to kill humans and take supporting actions to accomplish that goal. It’s not something intrinsic to the ‘AI’, but a way in which a tool is being used to do bad things. That in the course of this the tool might become uncontrollable…well, that’s a different issue. It happens to simple tools as well if you don’t use them right; and with the added complexity, the ‘right use’ becomes more difficult to ensure.
But, again, it’s not the ‘AI’ we need to worry about but the humans who make and program the machines. Therefore it’s those humans we need to focus on. Machines aren’t going to become sentient in any sense; because ‘sentience’ is defined by what we actually know as sentience, and that’s what people are. By that every sentience is measured, if only because we cannot know any other method of measuring it.
Maybe one day, artificially created organisms, such as the ‘Replicants’ in Bladerunner, will be motivationally so similar to us, and will live in contexts so much like ours, that they’ll be effectively indistinguishable from us. But we’re not even close to that right now—and I think that when the time comes, if that time comes and we all make it there, then these ‘artificial’ people or entities, unless created with destructive intent or mishandled—again, a function of something humans do—are likely to be so ‘like’ the rest of us, that they’re going to be our friends, and not some hostile alien life-form.
Bottom line: right now, why even waste thinking time and energy about HAI? Right now, watch for humans doing stupid things, as they are prone to doing. Do not worry about the technology but the technologists. The technology is the only thing that can save us; but some of the technologists and their masters in their infinite stupidity might just end up destroying us. Learn to understand the difference, and focus on the real causes of the threat!
About ‘Global Warming’: it’s here, it’s happening, it’s unavoidable as things stand, it’s unstoppable—so damn well prepare for the consequences, and stop wasting time moaning about it happening, or scientific resources trying to prevent it from happening. Period. Enough already.
There are so many bogus issues that distract our attention from what we ought to be focusing on; so many dumb, meaningless questions taking up brain-space when the important ones linger neglected.
Here’s another one for good measure: Overpopulation as a consequence of people living long lives.
The amount of argument-time spent on this is staggering and an utter waste, because the question is bogus. but it’s treated as if it were something critical to be considered in the discussion of longevity.
Overpopulation as a problem? You wish!
If we ever get to that point, we must first have solved all the problems associated with the consequences of “Who is going to get it and how?” If we actually manage to work out those problems, that would imply that the international world had undergone what amounts to a truly profound change. And the only way for that to happen would be to have an equally profound change in what you might call ‘human nature’.
If that happens, the whole ‘overpopulation’ thing will be a mere bagatelle to deal with. And right now we really should be focusing on more important things and stop wasting time thinking about bogus issues.
Our lives depend on it.

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Posted 13 November 2008 - 08:48 PM

Almost done, folks.

Don't know if anybody is still reading this but here comes the next installment.

A Letter From Utopia

Nick Bostrom, one of the foremost thinkers of the Transhumanist movement and a man I hold in considerable regard, published a little treatise of sorts, called Letter from Utopia. It’s a fictional ‘letter’ sent by a person in a transhumanist kind of world to someone living in the present. It is a vision of what might be and a plea to the reader to do what can be done to make it so.
As an Absurdist I find the vision rather woolly, as most utopian visions are prone to being. It’s also quite dull, and reeks of clichés inherited from an endless parade of quasi-religious utopian visions, that have more in common with, say, Mormonism than serious considerations of what it might mean to be ‘human’.
Not that this comes as a surprise. Philosophers on the whole are not very imaginative, but have different strengths. Nick Bostrom has a mind like a steel trap and vision to boot. But his utopian vision sucks majorly.
Anyway, in response to Bostrom, I thought I’d supply my own version of the 'letter'. It looks a bit like his, but is written from an Absurdist’s perspective and, I think, much more likely to be identifiably ‘human’. Of course, ‘transhumanity’ may not be human at all and instead have become ‘posthuman’. That’s a different issue altogether. But in that instance Bostrom’s vision fails even more decisively.
For you can’t have it both ways. Either you assume that ‘human-ness’ has a core of ethics and values, provided to us by our evolutionary heritage, and that this core will be preserved in a transhuman future. In that case you may extrapolate from today, but to be credible you can’t just pick this and choose that and discard what doesn’t please you. We are human because we contain all of the ‘core’ things of human-ness, which work together to make ‘humanity’. What we might call ‘evil’ isn’t eradicated by eradicating it, but by actually using it to define ‘good’. Take ‘evil’ away and you won’t know what ‘good’ is anymore. It’s as simple as that. Even if you merely emasculate evil, you’ll end up in basically the same position. A declawed and toothless Tiger is a creature to pity and might as well be a sheep, except for the dietary requirements.
Alternatively one might assume than ‘posthumanity’ is so far beyond what we are now that we might as well call it ‘divine’—and then all bets are off and I think we might as well be dead, because we will have ceased to be ‘people’.

A Letter from Utopia: the Absurdist’s Version.

It took a lot of energy to get this message sent back in time. It took a great effort to write it in a language that is the ancestor of the one we communicate in now. It took technology beyond your ken, so that you might hold this message in your hand: a message from a future that might be; a future and a world—well, ‘worlds’ actually—whose coming-into-being depends on you.
I have been delegated to write on behalf of a great many of us—though not all, because, as it has always been, not all agree on all actions to be taken. But those who supported me and who contributed to these words with their counsel agreed that the billions of kilowatts it took to open the connection to the past for long enough were worth it. Not that we know exactly which time-stream we managed to target, for such things cannot de determined with certainty. But it is one of the streams that will lead to us coming into being; and therefore you, no matter who you are, are one of those whom we call ‘ancestors’. We just don’t know which one. Temporal paradoxes are still beyond the ken of reason.
You are one of those who can make us come into being. For all we know, you might be one of those who actually made it across the threshold to be one of us. If so, remember this message and one day
Or, and this would be even more intriguing, are you the very one who initiated this whole project of ours? Are we closing a loop in time; finally and after all these years? If you are that person, why didn’t you tell us? For we do not know who first came up with the idea for this message. One day it was there, and somehow it took shape and... I was going to say “well, you know what happened”, but of course you don’t.
Not yet.
Would you like to know? Then make us become real. For we need you. Desperately. Whatever we are, we are because of you and all those others who believed that we could come into existence. No matter how much their visions differed, in the final analysis they all contributed to humanity still being here.
I would like to tell you a bit about what is now; that which I am allowed to tell you. Temporal paradoxes still elude precise calculation, and needs to be careful not to say too much.
And there is something else: in what follows, when I speak of ‘us’, it must be understood that it refers only to those ‘us’ who collaborated to send you this message. I, or even ‘we’, do not and cannot speak for all of humankind. For this is the most important lesson we learned from history: that diversity and ‘difference’ are the engines of all creation, as much as they are the sources of conflict between individuals and societies; that eliminating diversity and difference would have been the first step to our doom.
And so diversity persists and indeed flourishes, for never has the human species been more colorful and varied. In consequence, our views of what is and what should be, are not shared by all. And when I write ‘us’, I refer to a section of humanity that we, who sent this message, consider worthy of holding up as an example of the best we have to offer. I am aware that such an attitude evidences a certain arrogance, for it implies a judgment upon those who do not see the world as we do. But this is a corollary of the diversity I spoke of. With so many ways of living, if you don’t believe that yours is worthy, then why do you live it; and would even defend it against those who would destroy it?
Keep this in mind as you read what follows.
What I may tell you is this:
Humankind has left the Earth and spread through a sizeable segment of neighboring space. The eggs are no longer just in the one basket. No catastrophe has as yet wiped out the mother-world, but the survival of our species and myriads of other life forms that we’ve taken with us across interstellar space appears assured.
Just exactly how we have accomplished this scattering of the human seed I must not say. But rest assured that there is much more to be known about the physical universe and its possibilities than your current science conceives of.
It appears that we are alone in the universe. No evidence to suggest otherwise has been found; nothing to indicate that anything even remotely resembling ‘life’ as we know it exists. Of course, there might be still ‘life’ of a kind that we wouldn’t recognize as such—but by definition that would not be ‘life’, for we can only name that which we can apprehend. The evidence might, of course, not be sufficiently complete to allow us to be certain of our uniqueness, but it is compelling nonetheless.
Most human societies have recovered from the ravages of having been crammed onto one planet, without freedom to expand and living under an ever-increasing trend to and push toward homogenization, as well as a constantly worsening pattern of loss of individual liberty. Now the tapestry of human individual and social expression has, if anything, become more colorful and varied than it has ever been.
A corollary of this is that societies must be allowed their differences, just as individuals are. And societies are not perfect; and they must never be, because perfection is an end-point, and society thrives on the prospect of development. The same goes, of course, for individuals.
Death has become an option and a matter of choice. The accomplishment of this was the first prerequisite for making our world possible. Yes, people still opt to die. Indeed, whole societies are founded on a rejection of indefinitely-long life. But that is their choice. Some of them look unkindly upon those in their midst who beg to differ. But for those, if they so choose, there are other societies who welcome them. Sometimes this is painful for the individuals concerned. But we value the freedom to choose, and often ‘choice’ is a difficult mistress.
We treasure children; more than you may be able to appreciate. Every child is a gift. Every child is a human being. Every single child is as infinitely precious as every adult. No child is an undesirable burden. We don’t produce children to immortalize ourselves, or to use them to guarantee our survival when old and decrepit, or to prove our valor.
We need not abort pregnancies, for our medical knowledge is such that they are never a risk to the welfare of the mother. Even the unborn can have any deformities and genetic flaws corrected. Children conceived by accident are still children and treated as such. If their parents choose not to want to bring them up, there are always others who would gladly take their place. In the very rare case that a mother chooses to abort, the embryo is removed and grown to maturity in vitro or in another woman’s womb. A mother may choose not to bear a child to term, but she does not have the right to choose whether it lives or dies.
Our brain functions can be modified by certain genetic, biological and bio-electronic measures. The use of such modifications is optional. As with life-extension, the choices differ between societies and individuals. The degree of enhancement also differs, depending on choice. As a result, you might not recognize some of those alive today as ‘human’; nor might they recognize you as such, at least not by their definition of ‘humanity’. This is an aspect of the wide spread of human expression. We work diligently not to let such differences become the cause of conflict between societies.
We consider the retention of ‘older’ elements of our psyche as essential for our ‘humanity’. Indeed, we define our ‘humanity’ by choosing to retain our imperfections and those aspects of our psyche that challenge us every day to be what me make ourselves into, rather than becoming playthings of unfettered ‘instinct’ on one hand or slaves to ‘reason’ on the other.
We strive to reduce suffering induced by external agencies. There are causes of suffering that can be controlled and those who cannot. Suffering because of illness, externally imposed restriction of freedom, brutality, oppression and so forth, can be ameliorated by dealing with its causes. However, the suffering induced, for example, by unrequited love only be controlled if the sufferer chooses to have this done. Some do; others don’t.
We have accepted that nobody really has complete freedom to choose, because no choice is truly ‘free’, in any sense of the word. We do try however to maximize the human capacity to choose, but what choices are considered ‘acceptable’ varies from society to society, as it always has. Most societies have agreed that, despite even the most profound ideological differences, individuals who wish to leave one environment because they prefer to live in another, should be allowed to do so.
Large scale conflict has been reduced from being ‘common’ to ‘rare’. Territorial disputes have become almost unknown, as there is ample territory for everyone, and we have means to terraform even the most inhospitable environments. ‘War’, based on the need for control over other resources has also become virtually extinct.
By and large, this far-scattered humanity you may help to create is something to be proud of. However, it isn’t perfect because it cannot be: without imperfections humanity would cease to exist. There is no resolution to this basic dilemma: we accept imperfection as a part of our existence as men and women, or we cease to exist. Some have chosen for themselves what they saw as ‘perfection’; and the price they paid is beyond even our comprehension. But they chose, and it was their right to do so. Maybe they understand something we don’t. Or maybe we understand something else that they did not and now never will.
I believe that you can understand what we have become. Right now, as you read this note, it may be beyond your comprehension—but with the insights provided by time, experience, science and enhanced cognitive abilities, you will in due course learn what you need to know in order to understand; just as a child does, as it grows into this incomprehensible, wondrous, yet utterly indifferent, universe.
But it allowed life to come into existence. And we live. And it is good.
We live because you made us possible. We live because you and enough of your contemporaries chose not to allow blind evolution to control human destiny. We live because you had the courage to imagine and to believe that your imaginings were more than mere daydreams. We live because you believed that humans are capable of controlling their destiny, as societies and individuals. We live because you believed in hope and that a better world was possible and worthwhile working for.
Please believe that. Please keep believing that. Without that faith, this message is just another figment of someone’s imagination that will disappear in the vast ocean of human imaginings like a lone teardrop.

#27 till

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Posted 15 November 2008 - 12:02 AM

In Order to Live, Prepare to Die

Once upon a time I thought that, having accepted Emortalism into my life—strange turn of phrase, I know, because it sounds like something religious—the only acceptable attitude to take to living was simply not to accept death and dying; starting with one’s own death, which is always #1 on the list, no matter what people tell you.
Or is it?
Well, everything’s always more complicated than it looks at first, but also often simpler than expected. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but think about it for a while, and it may end up making sense.
Anyway, once upon a time…
Do not accept death!
I mean it.
Don’t.
Utterly and completely—with all your heart and soul and feeling, and to the point of anger, rage and implacable fury—reject death’s intolerable interference in human existence.
That’s got to be the starting point and every point in your life after that. This rejection needs to be unconditional; though it does, of course have implicit corollaries, like ‘abolish sickness and age-decrepitude and decay’. But they are a part of the whole package, so to speak. With the rejection of death, we automatically reject anything about out biological existence that makes death ‘inevitable’ in the sense of ‘not accidental’. Some would argue that maybe one shouldn’t confine such a rejection to ‘biological existence’, but that’s a different issue altogether. If we were robbed of the possibility of a ‘mental’ state in which we are empowered to and capable of making a choice not to live, I would find that intolerable.
Some time after becoming an Emortalist, I married and had children. With having a family of my own came the changes that accompany such a condition, at least in ‘normal’ human beings; and I hope that this will always remain ‘normality’ for our species, as long as it remains even partially ‘human’.
One’s life in many ways ceases to be one’s own. Responsibility is added, for others who depend on one’s commitment. This responsibility, in my Absurdist thinking, is accepted by a choice, conscious or not. Once accepted it changes one's life forever. One thinks thoughts that one hasn’t thought before, because one wasn’t in a condition and/or context to think them. Where once upon a time the value of one’s own life was unquestioned, ‘just because’ and for its own sake, the value of certain other lives suddenly gain prominence.
Resulting questions, usually starting with “what would I do if…”, at least for someone of my story-teller’s disposition, are inevitable, and the answers often are surprising. At least they were for me. They may not be for others, either because they expect the changes and are prepared for them, or else they’re not really ‘changed’ by their altered circumstances. If you think these people are fortunate to be in this position, think again.
The bottom line is that it’s possible to be an avowed Emortalist—and yet place the values attributed to the lives and welfare of others higher than one’s own. This is a decision, made consciously or subconsciously; but a decision it is. From an Absurdist’s point of view that the only way to look at this.
But it doesn’t make one into any less of an Emortalist. If anything, it adds additional support to one’s convictions. Because all of a sudden there are more reasons than just one—one’s own desire to survive—to want to stick around; not just to see what happens to the world or to do all the interesting things one might be able to do but never had the time for, but in order to do be there for those others and their descendants and so on. That, to me, is a far better reason for advocating and promoting Emortalism than some nebulous grand notion, not necessarily even justified, of ‘saving’ 100,000 lives a day, or of ridding humankind of ‘the scourge/blight/imposition of death’, or of ‘taking humanity to new transhumanist levels’, or yada yada yada.
All of these grand schemes and rationalizations for what is basically a desire to make sure of one’s personal survival, have the ring of hypocrisy. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t believe in grand concepts. I think grand concepts and ideologies are either fraud and deception, or fillers for the voids in people’s lives. Anybody without some visceral personal reason for advocating this or that grand scheme to change the world is suspect by default. That may be a flaw in my character and way of looking at the world, but so be it.
Emortalism, when supported by personal motivations that go beyond oneself and are rooted in the care for others, is Emortalism strengthened and amplified. And, no, you can’t really truly ‘care’ for more than a maximum of about 100 people. That’s because our brain is actually incapable of dealing with large numbers of relationships; and the more intense, involved, emotional and complex those relationships are, the less of them the brain can actually deal with. Meaning that the more we do care about a few people, the less we can care about lots of others.
Any ‘care’ relating to people inhabiting the world at large is needs by extension and through a process of rationalization. The fate of one’s country or society becomes significant, because the fate of those one cares for depends on the welfare of the society they’re embedded in. That society in turn is embedded in an ‘international community’, whose welfare, safety and so on in turn contribute to the welfare of your society. In this manner, there is a reason why humanity’s welfare is a matter ‘close to our hearts’—but only through extending by using reason to consider the implicit consequences of our ‘care’ for those we are capable of caring about.
It might be argued that this can’t possibly be true. Are we not capable of feeling intense compassion for people shown on the TV, suffering under the scourge of wars, prosecution, starvation, natural disasters? We are, though I daresay that many of us will try to suppress their emotions when viewing such images. But that’s not because we ‘care’, but because for the most part we identify and substitute. We identify these people’s pain with ours—just like every death is in some way our own—and we substitute, in our minds, people we do care about for those we see suffering. This kind of care is instant and transient. Remove the stimulus and the emotion fades pretty quickly. This is, however, very unlike the ‘care’ we feel, even in their absence, for those close and dear to us. That’s what makes them ‘close and dear’ to us. That’s why in relation to them the ‘care’ is not transient, and we can’t just switch it off when it’s inconvenient to have around.
This care is what keeps us engaged and connected to others and in that way to the world; because humans are profoundly social creatures, and our connection with others is our spiritual life-blood. Isolated hermits, who go out and sit on mountaintops or in caves to commune with nature and deities or whatever, are aberrations. As Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, once said: “Society is our only hope.” Indeed it is, and for Emortals this will become more so.
The connection with our social environment implies that, in some cases, the importance of one’s own life may be judged by oneself as being less than that of another. In this way, we may find the need for the ultimate sacrifice. Not because we’re bored, or because we don’t find life worthy of living, but because we must make a choice between the value of our own lives and those of certain others. This isn’t a matter of some general principle, like “a child’s life is more important than the parent’s” or something along those lines, but one of personal choice.
One of the hardest things a budding Emortal may have to come to terms with is this apparent contradiction: loving being alive so much that one is willing to become Emortal (not necessarily an obvious choice for some), and yet being willing to give it up for another if that terrible choice should arise.
For some that won’t be a choice, of course. They’ve already made it, or they think they have. But in some instances it’s probably safe to say that they have. They’ll never die for anyone. There isn’t anyone in this world and their lives important enough to make that sacrifice. Indeed, even the question itself would make no sense to these people—and maybe it never will. They already have the answer and it’ll never change. Calling it ‘selfish’ only partially describes their mental condition. It’s much more complicated than that. It has to do with being less than fully-human. Even animals, though most of these don’t actually have ‘choices’ in the human-Absurdist sense, behave better than that. The maxim “My life is of more value, under any circumstances, than any other human life.” is a symptom of psychopathology.
I suspect that some in the Immortalist/Transhumanist community would actually consider such emotional stuntedness as an indicator of strength; maybe even of a personality equipped better than your standard self-sacrificial animal idiot to soar toward post-humanism. After all, such emotions, such visceral reactions, such foolish irrational decisions…surely, they can only be indicators of weakness; not of the strength demanded by those aspiring to be more-than-human.
Well, they are free to believe this, just as everybody is free to believe any foolish thing they care to. But I predict, with some confidence, that these people will not survive for long as identifiable humans; either because they’ll kill themselves, or because they’ll become something that’s either inhuman-but-harmless, or else turn into something openly dangerous to everybody else. Let’s face it, it’s much more likely that stunted, modified psychopaths become a danger to the species, than some highly-improbable ‘Hostile AI’.
There is also another sense of ‘In Order to Live, Prepare to Die’ that we need to consider. This is the fact that one day we will die—in some way; possibly not yet thought of. Possibly ‘die’ will mean ‘die to being human’. But ‘die’ we will. And even if we don’t, after 1000+ years’ of being alive, it is almost certain that, looking back, if we can, to what we were 900 years before, will very much appear like ‘death’ of the 900-years-ago person. There may well be continuity of existence and of consciousness of existence—and, after all, this is what being an Emortal is all about—but looking back across the gulf of years it will look like a discontinuity.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the more you do with your life, the more interesting things happen, the more what you once were will be destroyed. That will happen even with ‘cognitive enhancement’, because it’s not just a function of some neurological deficiency—though that comes into it as well—but because of…well, ‘life’’. Change and becoming ‘different’ is a part of life-development and the inevitable result of experience. And ‘change’ implies that something that was there once isn’t anymore and has been replaced by other things. I’m not just talking about memories, but about who one is right now; what constitutes one’s identity; what matters now; and how that differs from what mattered once upon a time; and so on.
Death of some kind is certain. And we need to live with it. We need to be aware of the possibility of and prepared for personal annihilation in order to be able to live.
Unless, of course, we become ‘immortal’, in which case all bets are off. But that’s ‘religion’ and I don’t ‘do’ religion.
It’s possible that with everything I’ve said, some readers might be wondering if I really do want to be emortal. Well, I do. Not despite everything I’ve said but because of it. Emortalism, the simplistic version as understood by many of its, basically newbie, adherents—who think of themselves as 'Immortalists' anyway!—is only part of the story, and not the most significant one: that’s what 30+ years living as an unapologetic, never-wavering Emortalist have taught me. Yet, despite of this, the one thing that has never changed, no matter where my thoughts have led me, is my belief in the righteousness, if you will, of this:
Utterly and completely—with all your heart and soul and feeling, and to the point of anger, rage and implacable fury—reject death’s intolerable interference in human existence.
We can do this. So let’s. And let’s do it in such a way that, in a 1000 years, we are around, so that we can look back and say: “We did it. We won that fight and the ones since then. And though there’ll be lots of others, we’ll win those, too.”
Because in this game, only if you win will you live to see another day. And if you win, you will see another battle, and if you win that one there’ll be another, and… Things, by and large, are never going to be peaceful and serene and nice and manageable and controllable. And if they seem to be, then remember Rule #1 of life, Ephemeral and Emortal: Watch out for the piano.
What piano?
There’s always a piano.
Anybody denying that is, to paraphrase Robert Heinlein, either a fool or trying to sell you something, or both.
An Emortal existence will be a, literally, endless series of struggles: with yourself, with others, with natural contingency, with the inscrutable complexity and unpredictability of ‘life’ in an absurd, meaningless, indifferent and fundamentally incomprehensible cosmos. And in the end, whenever that may be, it’s incredibly probable that, whatever you may be at the time, it'll will die and be forever snuffed out of existence. Without salvation or redemption or a believable answer to the ‘why’ of everything.
Said ‘end’, no matter how physically emortal you may be, could be tomorrow. Or a few moments after you read these words. Feel your pulse and realize just how close you are to extinction at any given moment. Go on; just do it! Feel every beat of that heart of yours and realize that every single one of those might be your last.
By and large the human body is an amazingly resilient machine; but while certain elements can be allowed to fail without fatality, others will almost instantly kill you. These are usually tiny things and if you’ve ever felt your pulse and noticed that your heart misses an occasional beat, as even most ‘normal’ hearts do from time to time, think about what would happen if there actually weren’t another…
We live on the verge of extinction literally every second. Therefore every heartbet not used to ‘live’ is a heartbeat wasted. People who have a medical death sentence pronounced upon them because they have, say, a terminal cancer—see the much-publicized example of the late Randy Pausch— exhibit a heightened awareness of the preciousness of their lives. In Pausch's ‘Last Lecture’, a very moving document and especially if watched on video, he noted that he felt a sense of ‘authority’ with regards to talking about life, conferred upon him through his knowledge of his impeding death. He therefore did what he could to prepare for it, not just in the sense of preparing himself, but of ensuring that those closest to him were as secure and cared for as was possible.
Well, we all have a death sentence pronounced upon us; even Emortals. We just don’t know when it’s going to be executed. But feel your pulse and understand that it could be, literally, ‘at any moment’. You just don’t know. You really don’t.
The sad fact though is that we just cannot live intently, if you will, all the time. Cognitively it just isn’t possible. Our attention is occupied with the business of living and just things happening most of the time, and if we were distracted by reflections of the importance of living we’d be distracted from attending to important and possibly life-critical issues requiring our full attention without distraction. Besides, constant awareness of our mortality would ultimately succumb to ‘habituation’, as the brain adapts and makes less ‘urgent’, if you will, the matters focused upon; in this instance the ‘life could end any instant’ thing.
On the other hand, in this instance, cognitive adaptation can also be of benefit, because it can be used to make associate this awareness with as much of our other thinking and emoting as possible. It works like religion or any strong ‘belief’: think about it deeply and for long enough, and soon you’ll see everything in the world and your life ‘in the light of’ that belief. In this instance it isn’t some arbitrary creed though, but simple insight into a truly indisputable reality: your next heartbeat really could be your last. Yes: yours.
And even if your heart were replaced by the perfectly reliable machine that might not subject you to the same apprehension, there are still a gazillion utterly unpredictable contingencies in life that can do you in just as effectively, or even more so.—and there always will be, for as long as you live. Just like there will always be ‘battles’.
How long, do you think, will you last before you choose to kill yourself? How long before all your interesting games and pursuits will become just another game and another pursuit? How long before you grow weary of the prospect, confirmed over and over again by your experience, of more struggling? And more, and more?

What a gloomy note to end this book on, you might think! What a pointless end to it. How can this guy claim to be an ‘Emortalist’ if he entertains these thoughts?
Well…
One: I am a story-teller and it’s my business to have these thoughts. They are reasonable and inevitable to anyone willing to consider all the aspects of the Emortalist issue. You could, of course, live in denial and refuse to have them, or when they seem to come about just dismiss them instantly, so that they don’t disturb your carefully constructed world-view. But ‘denial’ is worse than unproductive, and especially to the Emortal. Denial of something you should not deny is a more effective mind-killer than simple, plain fear, because denial is fear to acknowledge what is demonstrably ‘true’. It will also kill your body—eventually. If ‘contingency’ doesn’t get you, ‘denial’ will.
Secondly, if you consider these kinds of thoughts ‘gloomy’ or ‘negative’, you’re in the wrong book. This isn’t a religious text designed to motivate you or answer all your questions about what’s what in the universe of the Emortalists. It’s a book of questions, and they aren’t meant to be simple! If uncomfortable questions make you gloomy or depressed, go and spend your last few years in hedonistic bliss, and then do yourself and the world a favor and just die.
But if you’re willing to face a long future of endless toil and struggle; of being engaged and connected with those you care about and by extension the rest of your species and its development; of not blinking when failure and death stare you in the face again and again, despite all your efforts to avert them; of living a life of being yourself and yet also of belonging to others; of forever leaving safe harbors and exploring wild, unexplored and dangerous oceans…
Welcome to the future!

(one more installment to come...)

#28 till

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Posted 19 November 2008 - 08:13 AM

Stories from the Future, Stories for the Future

Next to soldiering and prostitution, story-telling is probably the oldest ‘profession’ extant. It’s a pity that story-tellers nowadays appear to be mostly unaware of their venerable tradition. Not all, mind you, but most of them are. Also, story-telling has been torn from its rightful position of central importance, and been forced to share or even surrender its throne to a variety of pretenders. Foremost among them are ‘Literature’ and ‘Art’. Helping them, directly and indirectly, is a wide spectrum of liars, who have corrupted human minds by taking the magic out of ‘story’ and pretending that certain types of ‘story’ are physically real. I am speaking of religion and ideology, of course. I might mention ‘journalism’ as well. Advertising. Politics. Historical discourse.
Many learned tomes have been written about the essence, structure and the ‘why’ of story-telling. Explanations for the persistent human addiction to ‘story’ comes from many different and apparently unconnected areas of human thought. About the only one that makes any sense, however, is the one that states that we are stories; that what we call our minds are formed from complex entangled loops of narrative, and that all our lives, thoughts, feelings and deeds are nothing but expressions of those narratives; that our memories and our intentionality are just a way of looking at what goes on in the swirling clouds of narrative in our brains. In that picture of things, there is no central ‘core’ to our being. We are the stories, and it is there that we find what we call our ‘identity’.
What is the relevance of this to the subject at hand? Well, I thought it was obvious, in so many ways. The Emortalist project and the Transhumanist Utopia it might lead to in the imaginations of some, is nothing but a particular set of narratives, most of them grounded in and derived from narratives already in existence; stories as old as story-telling itself.
What Emortalists—and whether they call themselves that or not is, as you surely must realize, very important!—need to do in order to make the project progress, and ‘successfully’ so, is to make their narratives become the narrative of humankind at large; or of at least of a large-enough and significant-enough portion of it. In order to do this they have to tell stories that will grip their audience. The process is nowadays also known as ‘promotion’.
The way to ‘grip’ an audience—and, in the end, there is only one way—is to ‘engage’ and ‘involve’ them. They have to become a part of the tale, like the boy in The Neverending Story. They’ve got to open that book, start reading and be sucked into it, until the story becomes their reality. That process is sometimes known as ‘conditioning’; or, more uncharitably, as ‘brainwashing’. It has been used since time immemorial by demagogues and manipulators, and it has not lost any of its power; especially now that the manipulators have acquired new, shiny tools for broad-spectrum manipulation of people’s personal narratives. Adolf, eat your heart out!
One might argue that Emortalism should use those same tools as best as it can, and there’s some merit in the suggestion. But there is an even more powerful argument against it. For the narrative manipulations known as ‘promotion’, ‘conditioning’ or ‘brainwashing’—in ascending order of noxiousness—are all designed to reduce the intelligence and thinking faculties of their targets. In the parlance of ‘narrative’ it means that these manipulations are designed to simplify the complex story of the manifold expressions and aspects of ‘life’ into something that serves the purposes of those doing the manipulating. In other words, and not to put too fine a point on it, they’re designed to make people stupid. The record shows that the attempt is becoming ever-more successful, getting better as the enterprise acquires solid scientific grounding. The more we figure out what makes people think as they do, the better we get at dumbing them down. Knowledge is power.
The problem is that the hypothesis that a lot of people really feel more comfortable when they can be stupid, is supported by scientific evidence. Ironically, the sentiment is shared by those who would not ordinarily think of themselves as stupid or ‘simple’; quite the contrary. But every election in your average ‘democratic’ nation provides a plethora of examples. And there’s religion, of course.
But humankind is also possessed of something called ‘curiosity’, which is an evolutionary adaptation found across the spectrum of animals we consider to have some form of ‘intelligence’. Curiosity in itself does nothing at all, but its physical expression is an activity known as ‘exploration’. This can be internal, such as when one thinks about stuff that has become the target of one’s curiosity-attention; or it can be external, such as when one pokes around places that are labeled ‘off-limits’. I’ll come back to that later, when I talk about the Gatekeeper.
Curiosity and exploration lead to ‘expansion’—of one’s physical or mental horizons, one’s abilities, ones perspectives, even one’s emotional potential.
What I would label ‘good narrative’ provides the recipient—and the creator as well!—with one or more paths to curiosity and exploration.
‘Bad narrative’, on the other hand, discourages this. It can do this in several ways. One is by content that suggests strongly that curiosity and exploration and bad things—maybe not in all ways, then at least in some particular ones. The other is by providing narratives whose effect it is to create ever-deeper mental ruts and thought patterns.
The irony of what I’ve just said is not lost on me. After all, one could argue that my own Emortalist inclinations, sustained over as long a period as they have, constitute an established thought pattern that might be called a ‘rut’ after all these years. And my favorite kind of literature is mostly SF&F, which means my conditioning narratives are oriented in particular directions. And it is true that this has always been a choice. Certainly, nobody forced them upon me.
But this doesn’t affect the validity of the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, mentally ‘expanding’ and ‘contracting’ or ‘limiting’ narratives. Indeed, and despite the awfulness, pretentiousness, and conceptual, emotional and ‘derivative’ paucity of much SF&F, it still remains the genre where one is most likely to find ‘paths to curiosity and exploration’. That’s simply because science-fiction and its associated future-fiction offshoots are concerned with the future. And, just to remind you of one essential fact of life, whenever we explore something, it’s done after-now.
Yes, I know, everything is done after-now, because whatever you do, you can’t ever do it before-now, because that’s just not the way things work in space-time; not even in time-travel scenarios. Note that I called it ‘after-now’ and ‘before-now’, rather than ‘past’ and ‘future’; because these are different things. The mere fact that something’s done after-now, doesn’t make it ‘future-oriented’. But ‘exploration’ is future oriented, because, for humans at least, it is an activity resulting from an intention., and all intentionality is oriented toward the future. We explore, driven by a myriad of motivations, few of which may be rational. But no matter what these are, they all share ‘intention’.
Future-oriented narrative is very likely to encourage and promote exploration and investigation. All of which means that it nurtures a mindset that asks questions, because that’s what exploration is all about. “Why does this have that effect?” “What’s beyond that mountain?” “What would people be like if…?”
Future-oriented narrative is good narrative. Do not confuse it with narrative merely ‘set in the future’ though. A lot of ‘future’ setting is stale, static and just…well, ‘setting’. Examples? Think just about anything suffused with strong political ideologies, from Socialism to Ayn-Rand-ism.
Also, there are many stories set in the past, but which are really all about the future. The good ones, the ones that have survived in their basic form for millennia despite being reshaped again and again, are those that provide us with our basic framework of mental existence. Think of them as the bones of the body of human narrative. And the skeletal structure of that body doesn’t change much, though without it we’d just be blobs of…well, whatever.
These narratives, sometimes labeled ‘archetypal’, are formed by and during the process of ‘growing up’. They are provided by interactions with the society around us, which act as examples we observe and emulate. They are, of course, mixed in with other narratives that are specific to particular societies. In this manner a ‘mind’ is formed; put together from bits and pieces of various narratives. What comes out of it is what amounts to a pretty unique individual, which shares certain narratives—many of them so deeply hidden that they’re seldom made explicit—with others, thus making mental/emotional/conceptual links. These narratives are the source of that much-maligned phenomenon, the ‘cliché’. Though the term is almost always used in a pejorative sense—especially by literary and film critics—it is actually neutral, a term describing pervasive, widespread fragments of narrative that serve to give the members of communities common bases for thought, discourse and action.
Where am I going with all this?
Well, in the context of what this little book is all about, it’s the quality and content of the Emortalist—well, currently it’s really ‘immortalist’—narrative that concerns me. It seems to me that it is riddled with too much ideology, a great deal of hypocrisy and far too much ‘past’. The stories Immortalists/Transhumanists and their ilk tell us have a false ring to them. I think that many people exposed to these narratives sense this, and that makes the job of promotion and involvement of large numbers of people harder.
I also think that the Emortalist project is stuck between a rock and hard place; an essential dilemma that gives rise to these false-sounding narratives. I’m not sure I can offer good suggestions of how to get out of that dilemma. But I believe that if in doubt the best story to tell is one that reveals truth, and this is how I see it. And, yes, I know that what I’m about to say is going to have everybody and sundry in the Immortalist/Transhumanist movement (a) up in arms and self-righteous rejection of my analysis, or (b) carefully and disdainfully ignoring that it was said, which would be best accomplished by ignoring me. Well, such is life.
Let’s start with a surfeit of ‘past’ in the story; all of which is linked closely to ‘too much ideology’.
This problem is found mostly in the long-term Transhumanist and Posthumanist visions, promulgated almost as gospel inside the ‘movement’ and served up to those outside as the basic Grand Vision of what we could be; if only, as s starter, we were able to live forever. Said visions are derived mostly from archetypal narrative fragments of the mystical Shangri-La variety. They qualify as ‘religious’ and are at their heart almost indistinguishable from the precepts of, say, the Jehova’s Witnesses, who also expect to live ultimately in an paradise on Earth where the lion will lie down with the lamb and all that. Change the terminology around a bit, add a hefty dollop of science, technology and pseudo-rational babble, and you’ve got pretty much what the Trans/Posthumanists offer us.
“But”, you might argue, “what’s wrong with that? It’s all about building a better future than the past.”
It looks that way. And who in his right ethical mind would reject such a thing? Isn’t that what we’re all working toward, or should be working toward? So, how could such a vision for the future be considered objectionable?
Well, it’s a ‘bad’ story, no matter how apparently benevolent.
Suppose we could—without fear of dire and mostly lethal consequences as was the case in Joss Whedon’s Serenity—tweak a few genes here and there and make people ‘better’; so they would behave more ‘rational’; inflict less or no suffering on their fellow human beings; talk and not fight; strive to achieve together rather than apart; be more faithful to their spouses (Nick Bostrom himself once suggested that he might consider such a thing); be more truthful; have more profound life-experiences; be more sharing…and so on.
Suppose we could make up the magical gel-cap that does it all and mass-produce it.
Suppose this thing really does what it’s meant to do—to you and everybody else. Evil and suffering will be eradicated. No more drugs problem, no more filthy rich bastards taking from the poor, no more injustice, no more social strife, no more class struggle; enhanced mental abilities for all, to enjoy the life-experience and to love your neighbor and everybody and sundry, and… You get the idea, yes?
Questions:
First of all, should we make it, mass produce it and distribute it—free, if necessary, so everybody can afford it?
Secondly, if you were given the option to take one of those things, would you? (Or would you—just in case you’re tempted to say ‘no’!—if the very same gel-cap contained your Emortality cocktail, and indeed this were a pre-condition to actually get said cocktail?)
If you answered ‘yes’ to both questions, please stop reading right now, because we’ve got nothing to talk about.
If you didn’t say ‘yes’—and, if you’re consistent, it would have to be ‘no’ to both questions then!— you must surely also understand why the Utopian visions of Shangri-La like human futures are ‘bad’ stories. And in case you don’t see it yet, here’s the reason: because they remove our freedom to choose to be other than what we’re ‘supposed’ to be. And what we are ‘supposed’ to be, nobody knows—for the simple reason that we aren’t ‘supposed’ to be anything. We just are.
That includes being mortal!
There’s no reason get petulant about it, as so many Immortalists do. They think it’s somehow unfair that they have to die one day. That death is an ‘imposition’ on the species; something that ‘ought not to exist’. Within what framework of ethics and justice? Well, I guess it’s some cosmic thing. Like the universe isn’t being fair to its creatures, or like it mis-designed us.
Stupid universe! How could you not design us better? Don’t you know how just plain…wrong!...this is?
I know that Immortalists, when they’re in their philosophical mode, don’t think in those exact terms, but somewhere underneath something similar is lurking—and ‘petulance’ is definitely an applicable term. Like they’re owed something they’re not getting. Like they’re ‘owed’ anything at all. Like they have a ‘right’ of sorts; in this instance the ‘right to life’.
They don’t. Nobody has any ‘right’ to anything. Any ‘right’ we have is established through our ability to, if you will, ‘make it so’. If you don’t make it so, or if those around you don’t make it so for you, you’re not going to have it. In a social context that translates, for example, into a ‘society’ of social creatures being of a disposition to agree to grant that its members are entitled to this and that; and out of that, for many societies, have sprung our notions of ‘human rights’. Indeed, ‘societies’ are formed by creatures that can agree—prompted by whatever may drive them to such agreement—on certain rules of ‘social’ life and members’ rights and all that.
All of these putative, but ultimately human-created, ‘rights’ ultimately have their origin in one single fundamental cosmic mechanism, which you’ll find from the largest to the smallest scale, from cosmos to elementary particle; and on the scale of system-complexity as well, from elementary particle, through element, to compound to a physical structure and a human body, to even ‘functional’ structures like ‘minds’. At each level this basic cosmic rule expresses itself differently, depending on which emergent context it is expressed.
The basic rule I’m referring to goes something like this: Every unit of ‘existence’, at whatever level of complexity, resists its own destruction.
There are a gazillion ways in which to interpret and apply, from case to case, the terms ‘resistance’ and ‘destruction’, but I hope you get the gist. ‘Human survival’ is just one variation upon that theme, albeit one that’s very close to our hearts and concerns. Also the rule sometimes has non-obvious consequences; like that some UOEs (Units of Existence) actually appear to behave in such a way as not to be following this rule. That’s because the rule, like all rules, is ultimately statistical. Every damn thing in this cosmos is statistical.
Also, like many apparently simple rules, it can give rise to complex emergent phenomena that lead to its negation in certain circumstances. That’s why engineers, and especially software engineers, should know that ‘bug-free’ systems simply don’t happen!
Back to our own lives and the grim reality of existence, which doesn’t include any definite cosmic prescriptions, except that we usually really don’t want to be snuffed out.
But whether we actually manage to ‘make it so’ for ourselves; now that’s a completely different questions. What we actually going to end up becoming as a result of wanting to make it so, is a matter of natural contingency and our choices. Those choices, in order for them to be ‘choices’ worthy of the appellation, must include the option not to be like what some—maybe many; maybe even everybody else!—think we’re supposed to be like.
And, let us not forget that the choice to be ‘good’ is not by any means the ‘natural’ one; nor is it in any way obvious that it ‘ought to’ be made. Also, what is ‘good’ is likely to depend, as always, on an individual’s context. In situations where two differing and conflicting interpretations of ‘good’ are present, conflict will arise, and there will always be a time when ‘reason’ will suggest that violence is appropriate to resolve the conflict in one’s favor—unless, that is, the very notion of the possibility of violence has been excised from our brains and our range of possible choices. That’ll be the only way, because ‘reason’ does not just because it’s ‘reason’ exclude violence as an optional course of action, and quite possibly as the more sensible one.
A humanity robbed of its choice to do ‘wrong’…
Well, if that’s what ‘post’-humanity is all about, then ask yourself: is that really what you want—for yourself and your descendants? Is that what you’d want us to develop into?
If this is the narrative that we, as Emortalists (or whatever we choose to call ourselves), serve up to the rest of the world, it’s not a good or useful one; if for no other reason but that people aren’t going to take it seriously. Salvation and Paradise-on-Earth in one’s lifetime, even if it’s a long lifetime, is actually beyond the scope of most people’s imaginations, simply because what they have now, their current experience of life, is utterly different. It’s easy to concoct and even believe tales of Heaven-After-Life, because by relocating everything into another, incomprehensible realm it becomes conceptually manageable. It’s ‘here’ now and ‘there’ sometime after the ‘now’ is over and done with. But to cross the experientially conditioned narrative of their existence with that of a Paradisiacal Utopia is, for most, just too hard to swallow. It sounds like fiction, not likely fact. (And it is fiction, so the ordinary man’s intuition in that instance is on the mark!)
And, yes, the whole Heaven-After-Life is also fiction, but it’s fiction that becomes believable because nobody ever has to mix it with ‘real life’; except in the sense of using it as a guide for living, or patterns of narratives for thought and action. But that it should actually happen…that’s something completely different.
And, yes, some people will believe it. Of course they will. But ‘some’ isn’t enough. ‘Some’ also believe that the Earth is flat. ‘Some’ believe that UFOs will come and take them away to other worlds. ‘Some’ people believe that we never landed on the Moon. ‘Some’ believe any damn stupid thing.
But these ‘some’ are aberrations, and Emortalism isn’t meant to be just an aberration, but a pervasive phenomenon benefiting all humankind. The Emortalist narrative isn’t meant for ‘some’. If the enterprise is to succeed, it must become the narrative of most. Meaning that the story’s got to be told in such a way that it can become integral to the fabric of our species’ stories.
What people need to be able to tell themselves isn’t necessarily that the future will be all good and bright, but first of all that there will be a future for us. That ‘evil’ should still be with us, is much more credible than that it should have been erased. Indeed, I wonder, if for most the very notion that there should only be ‘good’—as absurd as the notion is in principle—doesn’t actually occasion a certain repugnance and gut-level rejection. The thing is, you see, if everybody is basically ‘good’, when in what way can you ever improve or ‘be better’? For these things are always measured against a social standard, against what others are. And so, what have we in a ‘good’ world? What happens to our development? Our notion that we can do something to… Well, what? What are we to do, to strive for, to develop into, to become if we’re placed in a position where we’re basically ‘flat-lining’? If all’s well with our world, everything becomes dull and pointless.
People know this, I think. It’s fundamental to the human narrative. I suspect that it is, at heart, what really drives everything: that we are not only imperfect, but that we are very far from even reaching the asymptotic part of the approaching-perfection curve. Tell people a story that claims otherwise and it’ll remain fiction to them.
Another tale that will remain fiction will do so because it’s just dumb and reeks of hypocrisy. We need to get this straight, though I have no idea how. Disposing of the silly more-than-human fiction is simple by comparison.
Remember those question I asked in the chapter titled ‘Where are the Emortals?’
I suspect that most of you glossed over them, dismissing them as thought games that were either inherently irrelevant or definitely irrelevant to you. When I say ‘you’, I assume, of course, that you’re an Emortalist of sorts already. If you’re not, you might have considered the questions more seriously, either to put you off Emortalism, or else to use as ammunition against it—whatever your dispositions and inclinations happen to be.
Well, we’re going to come back to them now, because we’re going to deal with hypocrisy.
The more astute ones among you might have figured out that the questions were really quite different questions in drag; and the real ones go something like this—and, yes, I know, this is going to be very long-winded; so shoot me:
Suppose that there were a way to achieve the Emortalist project—the introduction of significant life-extension to begin with, and Emortality in due course and by implication and the achievement of biological ‘escape velocity’—without doing this ‘openly’, as it is currently being done. Suppose we—meaning those of us who want to live indefinitely long—could achieve Emortality without having to rely on the, very public and essentially open and democratic, work being done by private and academic researchers all over the world. Suppose ‘we’ could benefit from such non-public research, but those benighted people who don’t know about it, can’t. However, it would be up to ‘us’ to keep mum about it.
That would mean, of course, that a lot of the problems associated with the introduction of Emortalism would go away. No overpopulation, no social strife, none of the grim scenarios I alluded to earlier in this book. The rest of the world would continue on its merry course, with the rest of humanity none the wiser, though many probably living better lives anyway, because moderate life-extension and better health and all that would continue to develop and spread. Not Emortality though. At least not initially. Maybe later…
Suppose that this were an possible course of action.
Should ‘we’ choose to take it?
Or not?
This is, of course, just an extension of the scale of the questions I asked earlier; but now we’re not talking about just you hiding things from your loved ones—because you can take them with you in this scenario—but about a whole group of people hiding something from everybody else.
And, by the way, never mind the implausibility of keeping this secret, for there’s always someone who can’t keep his mouth shut, or being able to implement it without the current levels of ‘public’ research and development. This is after all a thought experiment.
But suppose, just for the sake of the argument, that this could be done…
The important point here is that, yes, you and anybody you care to choose, can become Emortals, but not everyone will. Your own survival—the desire for which originally prompted you into becoming an Emortalist to begin with!—will be fulfilled, without the pesky consequences associated with the fact that, as things stand now, either everybody knows about it and becomes a potential Emortal or nobody will. You don’t have to get old and die. Neither do your spouse and children, or whoever you happen to care about. Your choice. But your neighbor…well, that’s a different question. Again though: your choice. ‘You’ in this case being plural.
In practical terms, keeping mum is not going to make a big difference in your lives for a long time. The world around will muddle on pretty much as it has, but without the upheavals likely if everybody did know about this thing.
In fact, you would be doing the world a favor in many ways. And you are certainly not doing anybody any harm. If anything, you won’t be a burden on he health system anymore, and you are probably going to turn into considerably more useful persons, now that you have a lot of years to look forward to, rather than the measly few decades you would have had. So, that’s all good. And you got what you wanted!
Guilt? Well, yes, there’s that. But about what? Not telling? Not causing your society to break into chaos? Remember the stock market upheavals and economic recessions and suffering; prompted by causes far more trivial than something like widespread Emortalism coming along? Would you want to be the cause for starting something much worse as those huge parts of the economy relying of people’s predictable deaths collapse overnight?
In due course, after all, Emortality will become widespread and pervasive. It cannot be kept a secret forever, because that’s not he way things work. Nor should it be. Eventually. But just not right now.
Now to the Immortalist/Transhumanist narrative, which basically goes like this:
“We will not accept that kind of scenario. We want to save the untold millions dying every month. Everybody should have this, and we’ll make sure everybody does. A.S.A.P.”
The hypocrisy of the narrative is that the vast majority—not everybody, but 99.9+%—telling and promoting it would do the exact opposite and accept the deal I offered above.
Why?
Because they’re human, that’s why. And because, despite the domestication of the “I-don’t-want-to-die” narrative, they really, really just don’t want to die. Because with the near-infinite human capacity for rationalization of that which is desired, thus making it kind-of objectively good, sensible and reasonable, they’ll find a way to rationalize away their previously held high-moral-ground stances.
Besides, they’re only liars if they know they’re not telling the truth; and it’s probably true to say that much of the lying is done to themselves—in terms of denial of the truth. And the truth must be denied; a classic case of making the best out of what appears unavoidable. Thing is, if this tale weren’t used as the stock-Emortalist narrative, then there’ would be no tale to tell and nothing to use as a focus to promote the cause, as it were. The only way to sell it to everybody is to say “we want it for all of you”, and that is also the only way to make it become real, because it provides a rallying point, a thread, a spine.
So, what was the point of me exposing all this to the ugly light of day? Why not just leave the narrative alone, instead of exposing it for a canard. Sometimes, maybe the truth is not best.
Well, maybe, but to Emortalists—incarnated as ‘Immortalists/Transhumanists’—I say this: You can’t afford hypocrisy, at least not to yourselves. You can’t afford living in denial of what’s real and true, especially about yourselves and your motivations and why you’re doing all this.
Recognize the promotional narrative for what it is: a tool to get the job done. But don’t succumb to your own fiction. Accept that your grand mission with regards to Emortalism isn’t really so grandiose at all, but is primarily about your own self-preservation; and, if you’re fortunate enough to have such people in your life, of those you care about. The same applies to just about every Emortalist you come across. That’s why people become Emortalists to begin with: because they don’t want to die; because they, too, have night-terrors when they wake up at some early pre-dawn hour and lie there and get a glimpse of what it means that one day they’ll die and be no more; because even those who have ‘religion’ are not exempt from experiencing at least a glimpse of the horror of the prospect of the precious narrative of their lives just…ending. If they don’t suffer these terrors, and if they’re just in this as an alternative to religion or whatever—as some surely are—well, what can I say. Variety and the spice of life. Personally, I will never understand such people. Emortalism needs to come from the heart and the soul and the gut, or else it’s just vapid nonsense and ‘just another’ bit of ideological BS.
For those who have felt the touch of death-consciousness (and why else would they have come to Em/Immortalism?), the ‘mission’ is not about ‘saving humanity’; making them into more than they are now; making the world a better place; saving the planet; becoming some creature whose shape and nature we can’t even being to understand and which many of us would probably find repugnant and off-putting. All of those things, or none, may happen in consequence of the Emortalist project succeeding. ‘May’—not ‘should’ or ‘will’. For maybe what will really happen could be something completely different and unforeseen. The future has always been resistant to precise analysis and prediction.
The ‘mission’ is about survival.
The ‘mission’ is about not dying.
That’s what it’s really always been about anyway. That’s what all our science ultimately has always been all about. Because we are creatures evolved with a built-in narrative that threads through all other built-ins: Survival; avoidance of reverting to ‘not-being’, the state we were in before being conceived and born. We are not in that state once we’re alive, and one could almost say that the essence of ‘aliveness’ is the existence of the ‘survival’ narrative. It does not matter that, once we’re dead, we won’t care anymore. So, one might argue, why give damn? I’ve had this kind of argument with many people. My answer has always been the same: I care, and it matters because right now I am not dead and I choose not to want to be dead. Whether I continue to care once I am no more, is not a factor in the equation. It also doesn’t matter that once I was not: before I was conceived, or before some critical point in my in-womb development that constitutes the dividing line between ‘being’ and ‘not being’. None of this is important. In terms of ‘justification’ of my existence, the past before-being is as irrelevant as the future-after-being.
Survival is the central tale of the Emortalist project. Everything else is optional. To make ‘survival’ into a mere component of some wider Utopian project, as Transhumanists are prone to doing, dilutes the power of that narrative. The philosophical sophistication introduced to the subject by the likes of Nick Bostrom, while lending it profundity, also deflates and dulls the narrative’s raw urgency and degrades its impact. Harrington’s Immortalist had just about all the sophistication required to enhance and channel the story’s innate energy. Anything more is useless ballast.
The flattening of the Emortalist narrative’s emotional energy is the direct consequence of the denialist hypocrisy of the Immortalists/Transhumanists, who would like it all wrapped up in some suitably respectable ethical framework. I would like to suggest that they drop the pretense and get back to what’s really behind it all; without apology and without the need for extensive justification but the one that’s true: “I don’t want to die.” (I know this ain’t gonna happen, but I no harm in suggesting it.)
Wouldn’t that return us to selfishness and all the wrong motives for wanting this? Isn’t the whole Transhumanist/Utopianist philosophy necessary to remind of why we really should be doing this?
Well, no—to both questions.
We’re still playing at it (the selfish thing) anyway, with the all the original basically me-me-me motives; they’re just covered up with layers of hypocrisy. And there are no reasons why we ‘should’ really do it for any other reason, except the one and only: because we don’t want to die, and death really and truly sucks.
Does that mean that this is likely to make Immortalists/Emortalists into people less likely to care about what happens to the world as it faces the realization of Emortalism?
I don’t think so. Indeed, the contrary is likely to be true. Someone who realizes that the fulfillment of his or her desires is contingent on this actually working out on the large scale, is much more likely to throw their weight behind making it come out all right than Utopian idealists, who are forgetting that it’s not about the grand distant better future, but about everybody living for long enough to get there to begin with.
It’s not a bad thing to be truthful; to admit that, yes, one wants this so much that one would accept the gift, even if billions aren’t going to get it. There’s nothing wrong with wanting it that much—not unless it’s at the actual cost of other lives, over and above the cost to others implicit in your existence already. But, now that you’ve admitted just how much you want it, has come the time to make some serious decisions regarding what price you’re willing to pay, in terms of personal inconvenience and sacrifice, to get it and keep it. If you want it badly enough …
This is the story wannabe Emortalists have to tell: to others and among each other. And they have to admit to this desire and its strength and how it drives them and drives them…as it drives everybody, only that some get more passionate about things than others. Emortalist newbies usually come into the fold because of this, and many of them are very, very much just afraid of dying, self-centered, uniopic and often fervent to the point of fanaticism.
Some never get beyond this. They just want stuff for themselves: more fun, more games, more ‘interesting things’ to do, greater self-realization, yada yada yada. This juvenile attitude is pretty much par for the course. Just because people want to live forever, doesn’t mean they’re any more perceptive or intelligent or responsible than your average Ephemeral. Actually, they aren’t. They’re just selfish, juvenile and scared; stuck, as most Ephemeral adults are, in the maturity state of a mid-teen and the reality-state of a life-whipped grown-up.
Others discovering their fear of death and drifting into an Immortalist harbor soon adopt the bits or all of the framework of Transhumanist-related philosophy, because it provides for them what the likes of me have been struggling to come to terms with for decades: a good reason why it’s all right to want this; why it doesn’t make you into a selfish git. Or some reason to pursue it at all—beyond “I don’t want to die”, which for many after a while of turns out to be not quite enough of a justification. It is the real and only reason, of course, but having a nice ethical framework to justify it is an excellent crutch.
These people often become missionaries, focusing on proselytizing for a ‘better world’ and wasting much of their time thinking and talking and often agonizing about what the world could be like, and what they could be like and would like to be like. They concoct these endless, fruitless narratives, none of them with a shred of evidence to suggest that they make any sense whatsoever, about what lies beyond the horizon—all the while forgetting to create those that’ll navigate us through the treacherous reefs lying immediately ahead. All these narratives are really for themselves, of course; but it looks so much better if they’re meant to appear universal and full of pseudo-general-profundity.
Sitting there, spinning useless tales, philosophizing vapid philosophies, pretending that with all this they’re actually doing something for ‘the cause’, when in truth they’re just…what?
I find it difficult to figure out just what they’re doing. Being Ephemerals, I guess; with Ephemeral mindsets; afraid of dying; pissed off at it and the unfairness of the universe; waiting for someone to fix this thing for them; pissed off at anybody who doesn’t agree with them; thinking that just because they support ‘the cause’ they’re actually doing something to advance it. Looking down on Ephemerals, when really they’re just looking down on themselves.
Are they thinking of doing this like forever? Or is it that they think that, if only this death thing were solved and off their backs, they could finally become better people, because life would just be so much peachier? Is there really any difference between these people and others who keep hoping for that big Lotto win before they start living? Like those who always wait around for their ‘big break’? If only…
In the little Franz Kafka tale ‘Before the Law’, man comes to a great door seeking the Law. The door is open, but the Gatekeeper tells him he isn’t allowed to enter at that moment. “It is possible, but not now,” he tells the man. The man tries to peer inside the door and see what’s there. The Gatekeeper tells him: “If you are so much tempted, try to enter—despite of my prohibition. But know that I am powerful. And I am only the first and least significant gatekeeper. Before each room beyond stand gatekeepers, and each is more powerful than the one before. Myself, I cannot even bear even one glimpse of the third.”
The man seeking the Law decides to wait around until the situation changes, so he can get to the Law. Occasionally he tries to bribe the Gatekeeper, who accepts the gifts, but remains unyielding. They also have lots of conversations, during which the Gatekeeper imparts much wisdom to the man. But the man does not seem to benefit much from all that, and indeed he becomes more petulant and childish as time goes on. He forgets about all the other Gatekeepers waiting beyond this one, and instead focuses his sense of being unfairly treated on the one immediately before him.
In this manner, the man waits for all his life—as does the gatekeeper, barring that gate. Finally, at the point of dying, the man asks the Gatekeeper why it is that nobody else came along during all this time to get to the Law. Everybody wants it; so why didn’t anybody try to go through that door?
That’s because, the Gatekeeper tells him, the door he guards was only meant for this man alone—and once he is dead, it will be closed forever.
The theme of this story was picked up, inter alia, in the Seinfeld episode ‘The Chinese Restaurant’, and also in the movie ‘Stardust’. In the latter, the outcome was very different to Kafka and Seinfeld though. Instead of paying heed to the Gatekeeper’s refusal-to-allow-access (in this instance to the ‘Land beyond the Wall’), the man in question tricked the Gatekeeper into believing that he had given up and, when the Gatekeeper’s attention was diverted, sprinted around him and through the break in the Wall. What he found there was both exhilarating and scary, and had major consequences from himself and others. Years later, his son, who was one of those ‘consequences’, had to face a much more cunning and forewarned Gatekeeper; but that didn’t stop him from trying—though ultimately success was achieved not by passing through the break in the Wall, but by another ‘consequence’ of his father’s original actions, which turned out to be of immense significance in other ways as well.
‘Stardust’, originally penned by Neil Gaiman and adapted for the screen with his assistance, is in the format, if you will, of a fairytale, but it’s also so much more, with its many levels of allusion and meaning.
For Immortalists and Transhumanists and their ilk—as well as for the myriad of those wannabe Immortalists-in-waiting—the story, especially when taken together with Kafka’s tale, holds important lessons. It is one of those narratives representing the spirit of the narratives we should be telling; rather than sitting around moping and thinking weighty thoughts about Utopias and Trans- and Posthumanist futures.
Way I see it, the only people who are doing anything worthwhile and actually the only ones doing anything at all, are scientists. Many of them don’t even know what they’re doing, but there they are, beavering away at the age-old and venerable human enterprise of survival; of our version of the cosmic law I talked about before. Some of them do the pit-face work in their labs, while others, like de Grey and Fossel, try to put all these precious facts together, to see the patterns underlying them and maybe use them to finally solve humankind’s oldest problem. Those are the good guys.
The rest…well, for all I can see, they mostly sit around and talk. A few of them, like David Brin, act as ‘consultants’ to help others in the real world with practical issues, but these people are few and far between—and even here I get a sense that the real issue isn’t being addressed; unless someone actually is doing it, but nobody’s talking about it. Maybe someone in some of the governments of the world is thinking hard about the consequences of impending widespread life-extension, but I have an uneasy sense that it’s more about how to prevent this from happening than the opposite. Which is, you must admit, curious, given that these people are human, too, and you’d expect them to have a sense of their own mortality. Or maybe they are really to detached from what is real and going on in their own heads—too full of religious, ideological or just general BS—that they actually believe they’re doing what they should be doing; and never mind that they, too, will go down the drain with everybody else into personal oblivion.
I really don’t know. Not being inclined to conspiracy-theorizing, I think it’s all basically cock-ups, not careful planning and plotting. Still, I could be wrong. It’s happened.
One of the reasons why I have kept myself apart from the Immortalist/Transhumanist ‘movement’ is that every time I explore the groups that are around, mainly on the internet, I find nothing to resonate with my concerns and what I consider essential to make this work. I go back and have a poke around periodically, but it’s always the same old story. Been like that for as long as…well, basically forever, only years back these people were mostly on the loony fringe, and many actually were outright weirdos. Nowadays they’re almost respectable, but their basic characteristics have changed little. They just more respectable because the whole longevity thing isn’t quite as outré anymore.
It looks like, apart from a few with a sense of ‘mission’ and a desire to found organizations that ‘do’ things—whatever those are, and there’s nothing to suggest they have a clue of what they ought to be doing!—everybody who isn’t a scientist suffers from a sense of futility and the basic uselessness of their own involvement in the grand indefinite-lifespans project. They cover it up by pretending to being some kind of part of it, by signing up to organizations of this kind or that and thinking that that’ll make a difference. It’s a bit like giving to a charity helping those suffering in Dafur and thinking it’s going to change anything.
Only way to do something is to go out there and do it. Standing before the gate and arguing with the Gatekeeper is worse than stupid. Great deeds are accomplished by people doing things; not by them waiting until others do them for them.
Still, the grim truth is that only a small percentage of the members of any group will actually be proactive, rather than reactive. Most of them will be followers—though in many instances they’ll demand ‘a say’; but they usually want it without being willing to accept responsibility and work. The whole ‘movement’ is like this. Which means that it’s probably futile, this appeal of mine, to have everybody get off their butts and stop philosophizing and wondering and asking the Gatekeeper dumb-ass questions and waiting and waiting and waiting, hoping that things will change. The thing is that what lies beyond that first gate is going to be a doozy of a problem, and if people can’t even get themselves to move and defy the first Gatekeeper’s injunctions, how are they ever going to tackle the next one?
Still, there actually is no excuse for anybody who dares called themselves ‘Immortalist’, ‘Prolongevist’ or, my personal catch-all term, ‘Emortalist’ to sit on their behinds and do nothing, even if they’re not scientists! They need not just skulk around the internet or other fora of the like-minded.
But first they need to change their narratives, starting with their personal ones, which should have the premise “I can actually do something useful.”
Next come the narratives presented to the world, which have to change from the current flat-lining Utopian BS that being peddled. People living here and now by and large aren’t interested in Utopias or even ‘futures’ in general, because most people lack a decent imagination—and whatever imagination they might have possessed is being leached from them through an ever less diverse ecosystem of narrative stimulants, served up through the electronic media.
I know, people think it’s just the opposite, but that’s probably the most insidious and widespread urban myth extant.
What people do, however, understand is the basic thing of not wanting to die. At the same time they really can’t conceive of anything else, because ‘death’ has been the standard ending to every ‘life’ story. Maybe some religions added reincarnation, but every reincarnation still ends in death. The rest of them offer either pie-in-the-sky heavens or dismal hells. Others offer variations on the ‘Hades’ theme. But these are not ‘life’ narratives anymore. All life narratives end in death. Which means that, despite the dreadfulness of it all, it’s also comforting in a twisted kind of way.
Long before Alan Harrington referred to our desire to become gods, Erich Kästner, the uncredited author who wrote the script for the 1943 Baron Münchhausen movie, made the Baron state at the end, that his immortal state left him in a kind of semi-existence: half-human and half-god. What he really wanted, however, was not half-ness but being one of those two completely. Since god-hood was not really an option, he chose human-ness and the woman he loved. And so, entirely by his own choice, he surrendered his immortality and thus became fully just-human again.
These lines express a very profound wisdom, and here, in a sense of closure, I want to come back to the equally profound wisdom of Absurdist philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of choice and action as the deciding elements in the judgment of all things human.
You see, trying to sell people Transhumanism and Utopia is futile to the point of ‘stupid’. That’s because most people either can’t grasp it or simply aren’t really interested in what lies too far beyond tomorrow—or both. When I say ‘most’, I’m being kind. My guess is that, without wanting to put numbers to it, ‘almost all’ is far more in line with the reality of human nature. And it is my experience that those who are interested and capable of thinking about such things, tend to be dismally incapable of considering the immediate and practical. Somehow these things don't seem to want to cohabit in the same brain. Search me why!
If selling Utopias and futures to people are futile, there is something that can be sold, and let me try to make you understand why ‘choice’ is this thing.
So, you wake up in the morning. A new day. Rarely do even those interested in longevity at this highly symbolic instant stop to ponder the beautiful ordinariness of this moment. Instead they probably moan and groan, silently or vocally, about the day they’re going to face. Rarely do they just pause to consider that they might not have woken up at all; that when they went to bed it might have well have been their last time ever to do so. And as the day goes on, even less often does anybody consider than any action could be the last time they perform it or anything similar.
Being alive is an ordinary state for those who are alive; well, most of them anyway.
But it could be different. Where they are now, and where they are doing what they are doing…well, they might not be there anymore. And one day they won’t be; not from choice but because that’s the way the cookies crumble. Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. The last dumb-ass question to the Gatekeeper. Curtains.
Maybe I’m just a freak of nature, but I am aware of this, and have been for as long as I can remember. And I have cultivated this awareness, because it keeps me on my toes and reminds me of what’s important and what isn’t. Nowadays it’s like breathing and my heart beating, or doing daily chores or whatever else there is that’s ‘ordinary’.
And what I know from myself is that the one and only tale I can believe is not the one that tells me that I’m going to be an Immortal and never die. Even for someone of my imaginative capacity—and I have a lot of that; no point denying it; that’s why I tell stories—that narrative actually fails to grab me. I guess, I just don’t have the religioid capacity or inclination required for it.
But I do get the ‘choice’ thing, and judging from the people I’ve talked to about this—all non-longevity folk—it’s something they would buy much easier.
“Well, supposing you did have a choice. Not committing yourself to living forever, but at least choosing if you want a few more years or not…”
That’s not living a most inconceivable half-human-half-god existence, but just having been given the power of choosing this one thing. It means not having to live with the niggling notion—somewhere in the dark corners of your mind when the awareness comes to the fore more than it usually does—that one day you might not have this precious ordinariness anymore, and you’ll just be…gone.
To sell this, make people believe that you’re not trying to plug the Emortalist line, and drop it cunningly into some suitably-angled conversation. Works like a charm. And in my novels, especially the Tethys series—where the theme is everywhere, mixed in with adventure and romance and political shenanigans and murder and bloodshed and the usual complement of good rattling stories—I’ve yet to hear a reader complain about the subject’s presence in the stories. Actually, talking about my work to people is usually a good place to bring up the subject—casually, mind you; very casually.
I am convinced that the “give people a choice” narrative is infinitely more grabbing and success-promising that all the Utopian and Transhumanist BS. People aren’t interested in this kind of academia-speak. It sounds elitist and grand and hoity-toity—and it is!
But that’s not what a human life is all about! Human life is about ‘living’, and part of improving the basic conditions associated with said ‘living’ would be to have a choice as to whether one lives or dies; about not writing the same dumb-ass ending under every life-story, but allowing the individual to have a say in how the end is written and when it is placed. Something else maybe than the dismally pathetic down-endings we are faced with every day, but whose existence we do our best to deny.
Choice is what we really want—and if we don’t want to choose…well, we’d like that choice, too—and by not making a choice we still make one.
So, in the end I must disagree with Alan Harrington, no matter my profound gratitude to the man for having wrenched my life into a new direction 30+ years ago. It’s not about humans becoming gods, because we don’t really believe that we can, nor do I think we actually want to. (And if you think that you do want it and that I’m just talking through a hole in my head—well, maybe I’m just too ordinary a person to compete with the likes of you.)
It’s about something much more basic, something that evidences just how profoundly we are connected, even in ‘mind’, to the basic laws of the cosmos, and in particular the one about the resistance of any object to its own destruction.
People understand that, at a level far more profound than anything else we can really appreciate. It’s possibly our most basic narrative, because every other is built on it. All we really need to do is go out and make this implicit narrative explicit; without covering it up and sanitizing it. And, let’s face it, when presented properly, it can be gripping and imagination stimulating. Because presenting people with ‘choice’ is also one of the ways to stimulate their ‘hope’, and to make them believe that they have at least one reason to hope.
Those of us who know what you might call ‘the truth’ about the situation, will, of course, realize that ultimately it will leave humans in the demi-godly state, and that will in due course create its own problems with some Gatekeeper a few rooms down the track. But that is for us to know and not to tell. Not now. Not until the time is right; until people have been given enough courage to go through that first door.
And those who don’t…well, some people will never find the courage to take thought, desire, imagining and planning into ‘action’. And that, too, is as it should be…because that’s just the way it is. Should we drag them after us through the door, whether they want to or not?
You go figure it out.

To finish:
After all this beating up on folks, it will be asked, quite rightly so, what I am doing to advance the Emortalist project. After all, talk is cheap. Actions are a different matter. And hypocrisy is when you say one thing and do another.
So, what about me? And, yes, sorry for bringing ‘me’ into this, but someone’s going to point a finger and say accusingly “And what are you doing?” Which is fair enough, because I’ve just pointed a lot of accusing fingers!
Well, in terms of real science I also can do only little to nothing. I just don’t know enough about the relevant fields to contribute significantly. I may have my own ideas, but their utility is questionable, even to my own critical self-inspection; and this would be even more so, if I broached said ideas to those who’d consider themselves much more expert at such matters.
“Man’s gotta know his limitations”, and all that. Nothing wrong with limitations, for we all have them. It’s part of that being-human thing.
But I do have science degrees (physics/biophysics and cognitive science) and I have spent more than 20 years working in what’s called ‘IT’, most recently for several years as a technical writer; which basically means that it’s my job to explain things to people. I also write stories—novels and screenplays—and have even made a feature-length movie.
Oh, and I’ve been an Emortalist like forever.
Like others I’ve often asked myself “What can I do?” to help this enterprise along? The answer was often frustrating, because the utility of doing anything except scientific/biomedical research and technology development is not obvious.
In the end I decided to use what talent I discovered I have; which is telling stories. And, from what you’ve read above, you may appreciate that this isn’t a bagatelle. I don’t want to get into the whole technical and social thing about story-telling, though it would fill another booklet like this one.
But stories aimed at large audiences can be very powerful and change things. It’s not that the pen is mightier than the sword—only in the minds of pen-wielders is it that!—but that a good story has the power to move people to do big things. As an Absurdist, it’s perhaps ironic that I bring up the Bible as an example, but there you have it. Mostly fiction and awfully written, but there you have billions using it to guide their lives. Or take something else, a bit more modern ‘pop’, like Star Trek or Star Wars. Huge numbers of people today think very differently about life and the universe and everything to what they would have, if it hadn’t been for ST and SW. Literally everybody in Western culture—even many of those whose native tongue is not English—knows the wink-wink when someone says “Beam me up!” (even without the 'Scotty’ at the end) or refers to a ‘Jedi Mind Trick’.
I try to tell stories that will appeal to large audiences, and which prepare them mentally for the things they’ll have to deal with in the near future. I do this by telling tales that are set in the far future—well, just over 1000 years—and on faraway places, but those places, at their core, mirror the familiar. They aren’t necessarily mirror images, but they contain elements of ‘life’ and everyday circumstances and, if you will, ‘decision-space’ mirrors of people.
Of course, not everybody is into SF&F, but I can’t help that. If you talk about anything to do with longevity and the future you invariably end up with SF. I tried something more contemporary once, but found that this also ended us SF-ish; so I told myself that I might as well bite the SF&F bullet and never mind the snooty way in which the literati look down upon the genre. Steve Perry has tried, with Immune Response, to be as un-SF-ish as possible, but his is the closest straight-down-the-middle tale with the requisite dash of science and no SF&F frills and ploys that I know of.
My personal task, self-appointed, is—apart from writing the next sequel in the Tethys series, which will delve even deeper into Emortalist issues—to promote my work enough so that more people get to read it. I dislike doing it, because it looks like I’m promoting myself. Still, this is a world of shameless self-aggrandizement and promotion, and I may have to bite that bullet, too. It sucks.
The bottom line, with my own case as an example, is that we can all do something, no matter how apparently small. And everybody involved in the ‘movement’ can. And it can be useful. Just exactly ‘what’, I do not know. Depends on who you are and what you ‘do’. But I think that starting with doing what’s possible, in whatever way that may be, to communicate actively with people who are not ‘on-board’—rather than the already-converted—is an excellent beginning.
And, to all the Immortalists/Transhumanists with their symposia and academic chats and books and movies and internet sites and high-flying thoughts I say: your promotional skills suck! Sorry, but that’s the only way to say it. It’ll look cool to the converted, but those standing apart will, by and large, be untouched. Recruiting Ephemerals into the Emortal camp is not a job for amateurs.
Look at how the pros do it! They succeed selling just about anything, useful and utterly useless, for good reasons. ‘Persuasion’ is an art-form and a skill, and nor something that one just ‘does’.
To those to feel too powerless to do anything about ‘doing’ things: Feel better just talking to those who think like you? Want to just ‘share’ in the warm sentiments and companionship of a like-minded ‘community’?
Well, it’s not about feeling better. It’s about survival, and if we want to make this work, we need many, many more people on-board and ready-to-go when it happens. Not thousands either. We need millions—and that’s just to start the ball rolling.
Think about that.


And that's the end, folks.




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