37 replies to this topic

[Teixeira]

Deserves? Well if you could grant it to one person, or if the costs involved for the initial treament of a humas were so high no one else could really afford it--then it would be a hard decicion. I'd go with someone who has been dedicated to the field of AGI so that the kind of exponential intelligence we refer to as Singularity-could occur sooner and help get those prices down as everyone deserves it ;-)

Did you consider the possibility that an immortal body might have a property based on a "field" (according to Physics, the field is of infinite dimension, is long enought for the entire planet). In that field, you have all the informations everybody else needs to became immortal. And that´s why, to deserve immortality does not mean that the others don´t get it for free (it´s not exactly for free-this is a long story- but the price is not in money and it´s a price you can afford it anyway).

[forever freedom]

Good question! And why? Because "there is no such thing as a free lunch"!
If immortality is so important, you must have to do something absolutly fantastic to deserve it.
So far I only know one person who did it.

Ok i'm tired of reading your cryptic posts. Who did what? Would you care to tell us?

You are right, I should have told it in the first place.
Jesus did that.

Ah how boring.

I thought you could say that, but had hopes you had come up with a crackpot interesting theory (because as far as i recall you hadn't mentioned christian beliefs in previous posts). So much for some Sunday amusement.

That´s what you think.
Jesus seems a boring hipothesis only if you don´t consider the "interesting theory" where I work for some time.

Let´s start with the hipothesis: what if Jesus was a time traveller from the future?
Before we go ahead, we have a mathematical detail that we need to consider: Jesus is the "class of equivalence" of all the events in the space-time where somebody decides "to die for the others".
When such a experience occurs, the values of the parameters involved are absolutly the same. And because the values of psychological energy became of "biblical proportions", the conscience is forced to make a time travel to the past (it cannot stay in the "present") to an event that belong to the same class of equivalence: Jesus!
(Sorry if I desapointed you with the other post).

Now that's more interesting

I still don't understand it very well, though. Can you explain a bit more?

[j0lt_c0la]

I imagine that people in the Dark Ages might have thought to themselves, "Even if they made a cure for plague, only the king and his court would ever have access to it!" Now you can get antibiotics for free at Giant Eagle.

You can also argue that nobel prize and others should be given to everyone who want them, but then it´s value will be zero. You have to deserve the precious things, they just cannot be given "for free" because that is also incompatible with the dignity of these things.
Of course one can always say that the laws of nature are unfair but I don´t think so.
It can happen that there are good reasons for things to be as they are, it just happens that somebody might not know those reasons (and that doesn´t prove the reasons are not good).

I don't even get how that was a refutation of my statement. Life extension isn't like a Nobel, which is given out to award success in one's field, it's a medical treatment, like how we live longer now because we have antibiotics. Do only special people deserve not to die of TB or strep? Is there any necessary medical treatment that did not, sooner or later, become cheaper and available to most people? Aging is a disease, and everyone deserves to receive treatment for their illnesses.

[Teixeira]

Good question! And why? Because "there is no such thing as a free lunch"!
If immortality is so important, you must have to do something absolutly fantastic to deserve it.
So far I only know one person who did it.

Ok i'm tired of reading your cryptic posts. Who did what? Would you care to tell us?

You are right, I should have told it in the first place.
Jesus did that.

Ah how boring.

I thought you could say that, but had hopes you had come up with a crackpot interesting theory (because as far as i recall you hadn't mentioned christian beliefs in previous posts). So much for some Sunday amusement.

That´s what you think.
Jesus seems a boring hipothesis only if you don´t consider the "interesting theory" where I work for some time.

Let´s start with the hipothesis: what if Jesus was a time traveller from the future?
Before we go ahead, we have a mathematical detail that we need to consider: Jesus is the "class of equivalence" of all the events in the space-time where somebody decides "to die for the others".
When such a experience occurs, the values of the parameters involved are absolutly the same. And because the values of psychological energy became of "biblical proportions", the conscience is forced to make a time travel to the past (it cannot stay in the "present") to an event that belong to the same class of equivalence: Jesus!
(Sorry if I desapointed you with the other post).

Now that's more interesting

I still don't understand it very well, though. Can you explain a bit more?

Let´s start with the mathematics. It´s no big deal if we are not too exigeant regarding formalisms. So, if you have a set of numbers and you define a similarity relation between them, the sub-set of numbers that verify that similarity, are a "class of equivalence" (for instance the even numbers in the set of integers).
In our case, all the situations where somebody died for the others, are a "class of equivalence" of the case of Jesus (because all those situations are similar). In fact Jesus is the visible face of other similar situations on the future (wich could not been put in a "theater" mode like Jesus´live). In fact without Jesus testimony, how would we know about those facts in the future?
Regarding Jesus´life, from the begining, aren´t there too many strange facts around Him, as one would expect from someone coming from the future? Could it be that the Angels in the story were some kind of "Guardians of Time?", given the fact of the extreme precautions that a time travel demands? (nothing can go wrong!).
Why is it not possible to find Jesus´body? And why did He ascend to Heaven? Because He was simply going back to the future?? (He didn´t belong to that time, so to speak).
For the moment, I leave these ideas that I hope are understendable.

[brokenportal]

Anybody who helps us get votes here deserves to live indefinitely.

http://imminst.org/a...ommunity-giving

[Teixeira]

I imagine that people in the Dark Ages might have thought to themselves, "Even if they made a cure for plague, only the king and his court would ever have access to it!" Now you can get antibiotics for free at Giant Eagle.

You can also argue that nobel prize and others should be given to everyone who want them, but then it´s value will be zero. You have to deserve the precious things, they just cannot be given "for free" because that is also incompatible with the dignity of these things.
Of course one can always say that the laws of nature are unfair but I don´t think so.
It can happen that there are good reasons for things to be as they are, it just happens that somebody might not know those reasons (and that doesn´t prove the reasons are not good).

I don't even get how that was a refutation of my statement. Life extension isn't like a Nobel, which is given out to award success in one's field, it's a medical treatment, like how we live longer now because we have antibiotics. Do only special people deserve not to die of TB or strep? Is there any necessary medical treatment that did not, sooner or later, become cheaper and available to most people? Aging is a disease, and everyone deserves to receive treatment for their illnesses.

As I see it, immortality doesn´t got nothing to do with life extension due to antibiotics. We´re talking of two completly different things. I don´t believe medical treatment will do one single step towards immortality. If doctors new anything really important about human nature, the situation wouldn´t be as miserable as it is now. If doctors did not produced human nature how do they now how to improve it until the level of immortality?? They don´t know what points need to be modified and in what way, in order to produce immortality. There is nothing in this world that can help doctors to do such a thing!

[SiliconAnimation]

Who really deserves to live forever?

A better question might be, "How do we make anti-aging valuable to corporations, governments and consumers?" Deservedness will follow suit with already existing methods of evaluation.

I suppose the most common answer will be that we all deserve it. But why?

While we have a sustainable population, everyone is worth it on the gruonds that they are part of humanity. Once we exceed a threshold of sustainable population priorities will shift. I should think it would follow or be ideal too that if eliminating power-hungry machinery from the power grid will preserve some natural resources so that a man or woman can have heat in the winters or water pumped into the desert that those machines will be shortchanged for the human being.

This strikes me as mawkish sentimentality. It seems pretty obvious, unless you believe the Singularity will suddenly come upon us, and everybody at once will be swept up into a sort of techno-nerdy version of the Christian rapture -- an indulgence in mere fantasy in my opinion, choices are going to have to be made. If the criteria were to be based on contributions to humanity as a whole -- artistic, scientific, etc. -- how many of us would make the cut. I guess a few at best. Or more likely, none. Doubtless, some will argue that it is all about potential. But if in 80 years we haven't achieved even the tiniest fraction of what Shakespeare, Goethe, Gauss, Newton, or Einstein achieved in their lifetimes, is another 800 years going to make a big difference?

I wouldn't worry about achievements being the criterion. A large portion of the global population does terrible in the IQ test and are still considered valuable contributions to society. What should concern you is a small handful of extremely powerful and talented people getting it and granting it only to a large group of selected idiots.

So who's going to live forever and who's going to die? Ideally, how should this determination be made? And realistically, how is it actually likely to happen?

Ideally everyone would have a shot at it. Realistically there is going to be a lot of lies, deceit and witholding of the technology mostly because of resource shortages and feuds.

[Putz]

Deserve? You can't place a value on societal input because we really can't measure that (yet, at least). The reason is that the universe is more complex than a history textbook that has a few kilobytes of text. Call it chaos/butterfly theory if you want, but this is a fact.

A random Gallic peasant from the early renaissance has tens of thousands of descendants today, some famous, some infamous, some rich, some poor. The lives of 16 million people on earth today were dependent on Genghis Khan's "sowing of his oats" - actually that's only his direct descendants, the ripples caused by his conquests, and descendants probably also influenced practically the entire world's current population. If a Sumerian warrior raped a different woman than the one he had in 6000 BC at least 100 million people today would not exist and instead there would be a range of 0 - 500 billion totally different unique people existing in 2009 AD depending on how descendants fared and their gross contribution to technological, cultural, economic, and political change.

If someone pioneered market economics and the scientific method at the zenith of the Roman Empire, homo sapiens may have been immortal and flitting across the galaxy by 1600 AD (I would never have been born in this scenario so I selfishly am happy that things haven't turned out that way so fast).

Hell, perhaps the reason why the Cold War didn't become a nuclear holocaust is because of a myriad chain of causal events resulting from some Russian serf deciding to cut down a random tree way back when.

This process is happening every second, and you obviously should not measure it merely by comparing "deserving" people today to figures in the past that happened to become "known" due to a fortunate series of events, intelligent marketing, and prolific literary output. Your cat may as well "deserve" it the most for eating 3 insects today instead of 1.

Edited by Putz, 12 December 2009 - 11:40 PM.