This is the second post in my chain of reflections on immortality, where I will present counterarguments to existing objections or misconceptions about life extension. I recommend reading the first part.
***
Q3: What if progress stops? (addition)
A: New ideas do not require new corpses. That is not a humane approach. A new paradigm usually wins not because the old one dies out, but because it offers better explanations, better tools, and a better quality of life.
Imagine a composer with 180 years of practice, a philosopher with 220 years of dialogue between eras, a director who has witnessed five technological revolutions, a scientist who personally carries to completion longitudinal studies that were begun a century earlier.
That does not sound like stagnation. It sounds like the possibility of depths of understanding and mastery that we never seen before.
O5: Does death give life meaning?
A: To me, this is one of the biggest misconceptions about immortality, life and death.
Do you really sometimes think: “Oh, soon I will start falling apart, experience chronic fatigue and pain, and then disappear forever. How inspiring!”?
Would life really lose its meaning if you knew that a thousand, or many thousands, of years of life and possibilities lay ahead of you? It seems to me the opposite is true.
The only thing death motivates me to do is fight against it. So that I can keep living, creating, enjoying life, so that all of this does not disappear. I do not believe I would stop striving toward other goals if I became immortal. Those goals are not connected to death, so why should death affect them?
If I want to play the guitar, then I want to play the guitar. If I want to write a book, then I want to write a book. A rose is a rose is a rose, that’s all. I do these things not because I will die, not because I have to “make sure I try them in time,” but because I simply want them.
“Death makes life valuable” is absurd.
If someone told us that our phone would always work well and never become obsolete, would we stop valuing it?
If the risk of dying gives life meaning, then does that mean the older or sicker a person is, the more valuable their life becomes? So if you had to choose between saving a 110-year-old man and a little boy, would you choose the 110-year-old man?
Is an infant’s life valuable only because he could easily die? I think it is valuable because he has many years of potentially happy life ahead of him. Death has nothing to do with that value.
In childhood we do not think about death, often we do not even know about it, and yet we still rejoice in life. In fact, we often rejoice in it far more intensely than in adulthood.
In reality, we value life not because it can be taken away, but because it contains love, beauty, knowledge, the possibility of joy, and creativity. Death does not create those qualities; it simply cuts them off.
If death really were what gave life meaning, then why do we consider murder or terminal illness to be bad?
Death can intensify a sense of scarcity. The feeling that you do not have much time left and need to accomplish a great deal.
But that is not meaning — it is anxiety.
Deadlines, as we know, do not protect against procrastination. If they mobilize our resources at all, it usually happens closer to the deadline itself, rather than making us productive throughout the entire time allotted for the task.
Finally, let me quote a random commenter from the internet:
“I mean, c’mon! Death as a motivator? Seriously? Death doesn't even motivate people to stop smoking! Do people actually believe that everyone would just sit around watching TV if it weren't for death? Oh, wait, most people do that now. Ha! Some motivator!” [1]
O6: Will there be inequality between the rich and the poor?
A: Injustice in distribution is a political problem, not a problem with the good itself.
By the same logic, one could say antibiotics are bad because at first they were not available to everyone; the internet is bad because it was initially elitist; organ transplantation is bad because waiting lists are unfair.
Technologies usually reach everyone over time. Computers and mobile phones were once inaccessible to ordinary people too. Today, a poor person in Europe lives better than a king did three hundred years ago.
Second, aging is unlikely to be solved by one single intervention. It is far too complex a problem for there to be one universal panacea. By the time intervention number two appears, intervention number one will already have every chance of being available to the wider public.
And in order to develop a hypothetical “vaccine against aging,” it would still be necessary to conduct preclinical studies and then three phases of clinical trials according to all the proper rules — something that cannot be done in complete secrecy. That is simply impossible if manufacturers want to sell their drugs legally.
Creating a treatment for aging really is profitable: billions of people would want to use it, which is more than the customer base of any medicine that has ever existed before.
Finally, I want to quote a passage I took from another life-extension website:
“A large part of the world's population still live hand to mouth. They cant afford clean drinking water or basic sanitation.
Basic medical conditions that we all take for granted are not currently available to a large part of the world's population. This inequality has existed for thousands of years already. Why should the emergence of any new technology challenge this reality any more than the discovery of antibiotics, water treatment or basic sanitation did.
Children still starve to death or die of basic treatable diseases every day. Right wrong or indifferent this is reality. We have not as a race been able to solve this situation in the past. Why though should this stand as any form of impediment to the progress of medical science. Why should i die before I have to because an international inequality that has existed since the dawn of civilisation makes science morally bankrupt for seeking answers.
Any argument that cites the lack of global availability for life extension technology as an impediment to progress is, in my mind emotive and out of touch with reality.” [2]
O7: An eternal dictator?
A: I am not a political psychologist, of course, but I think that sometimes a short life may actually intensify greed, dynastic thinking, and the struggle for urgent accumulation. A long life may have the opposite effect.
But in any case: how many stories do you know in which a dictatorship ended because the dictator died from causes related to aging?
He simply died, everything ended, people started living happily, and democracy arrived. It seems to me that even if such stories exist, they are clearly not the dominant pattern.
Simply waiting for a dictator to die is a bad strategy for fighting authoritarian regimes.
O8: What about institutions, work, and retirement?
A: What if our familiar cycle of “school – university – work – retirement” breaks down? I would say: great!
Even now, that cycle fits reality poorly: people change professions, study in adulthood, and return to the labor market. You have probably experienced the difficulty of choosing a profession at a young age yourself, because according to that old model you were supposed to choose once and for all — and even now, people can still be shamed for trying to find themselves or for leaving a position.
And older people entering retirement do not always have it easy either. Some grew up within this linear model of development and devoted their lives to a single vocation, which they now can no longer practice. The meaning of life may simply disappear, and a person may find themselves alone and miserable in a rocking chair.
The linear model of life is a product of the industrial era. It was convenient when life was shorter, work was more standardized, and education was rare. A longer life would allow us to have repeated cycles of education and many career possibilities.
But that is only if you look at the world as a static picture. In reality, AI and robotics are not going anywhere, and it is obvious that the labor market will at the very least change radically in the coming years, if it does not disappear almost entirely.
UBI — universal basic income — may emerge. There would be no need for a separate category of “retirement”; income would always be there, and scarcity would recede into the past. This idea has both pros and cons, but since this is an FAQ on immortality, I will not go deeper into it here and will leave it for the FAQ on AI.
As this point and the previous two show, social problems are determined not by biological age as such, but by rules of access to power, property, education, career transitions, the structure of the economy, and so on.
Death today may function as a crude compensator for bad institutions, but the problem is not the length of life — it is the structure of our society.
***
That is all for today. If I made mistakes anywhere or offered weak counterarguments, I would be glad to hear your comments and suggestions on how to strengthen them. Wishing everyone an immortal future!
I have read parts 1 & 2, and I agree. Death is a thief that has already taken from me, my father and mother. I want death defeated so I don't have to lose my brothers, or they and my kids, me.
This is the second post in my chain of reflections on immortality, where I will present counterarguments to existing objections or misconceptions about life extension. I recommend reading the first part.
***
Q3: What if progress stops? (addition)
A: New ideas do not require new corpses. That is not a humane approach. A new paradigm usually wins not because the old one dies out, but because it offers better explanations, better tools, and a better quality of life.
Imagine a composer with 180 years of practice, a philosopher with 220 years of dialogue between eras, a director who has witnessed five technological revolutions, a scientist who personally carries to completion longitudinal studies that were begun a century earlier.
That does not sound like stagnation. It sounds like the possibility of depths of understanding and mastery that we never seen before.
O5: Does death give life meaning?
A: To me, this is one of the biggest misconceptions about immortality, life and death.
Do you really sometimes think: “Oh, soon I will start falling apart, experience chronic fatigue and pain, and then disappear forever. How inspiring!”?
Would life really lose its meaning if you knew that a thousand, or many thousands, of years of life and possibilities lay ahead of you? It seems to me the opposite is true.
The only thing death motivates me to do is fight against it. So that I can keep living, creating, enjoying life, so that all of this does not disappear. I do not believe I would stop striving toward other goals if I became immortal. Those goals are not connected to death, so why should death affect them?
If I want to play the guitar, then I want to play the guitar. If I want to write a book, then I want to write a book. A rose is a rose is a rose, that’s all. I do these things not because I will die, not because I have to “make sure I try them in time,” but because I simply want them.
“Death makes life valuable” is absurd.
If someone told us that our phone would always work well and never become obsolete, would we stop valuing it?
If the risk of dying gives life meaning, then does that mean the older or sicker a person is, the more valuable their life becomes? So if you had to choose between saving a 110-year-old man and a little boy, would you choose the 110-year-old man?
Is an infant’s life valuable only because he could easily die? I think it is valuable because he has many years of potentially happy life ahead of him. Death has nothing to do with that value.
In childhood we do not think about death, often we do not even know about it, and yet we still rejoice in life. In fact, we often rejoice in it far more intensely than in adulthood.
In reality, we value life not because it can be taken away, but because it contains love, beauty, knowledge, the possibility of joy, and creativity. Death does not create those qualities; it simply cuts them off.
If death really were what gave life meaning, then why do we consider murder or terminal illness to be bad?
Death can intensify a sense of scarcity. The feeling that you do not have much time left and need to accomplish a great deal.
But that is not meaning — it is anxiety.
Deadlines, as we know, do not protect against procrastination. If they mobilize our resources at all, it usually happens closer to the deadline itself, rather than making us productive throughout the entire time allotted for the task.
Finally, let me quote a random commenter from the internet:
O6: Will there be inequality between the rich and the poor?
A: Injustice in distribution is a political problem, not a problem with the good itself.
By the same logic, one could say antibiotics are bad because at first they were not available to everyone; the internet is bad because it was initially elitist; organ transplantation is bad because waiting lists are unfair.
Technologies usually reach everyone over time. Computers and mobile phones were once inaccessible to ordinary people too. Today, a poor person in Europe lives better than a king did three hundred years ago.
Second, aging is unlikely to be solved by one single intervention. It is far too complex a problem for there to be one universal panacea. By the time intervention number two appears, intervention number one will already have every chance of being available to the wider public.
And in order to develop a hypothetical “vaccine against aging,” it would still be necessary to conduct preclinical studies and then three phases of clinical trials according to all the proper rules — something that cannot be done in complete secrecy. That is simply impossible if manufacturers want to sell their drugs legally.
Creating a treatment for aging really is profitable: billions of people would want to use it, which is more than the customer base of any medicine that has ever existed before.
Finally, I want to quote a passage I took from another life-extension website:
O7: An eternal dictator?
A: I am not a political psychologist, of course, but I think that sometimes a short life may actually intensify greed, dynastic thinking, and the struggle for urgent accumulation. A long life may have the opposite effect.
But in any case: how many stories do you know in which a dictatorship ended because the dictator died from causes related to aging?
He simply died, everything ended, people started living happily, and democracy arrived. It seems to me that even if such stories exist, they are clearly not the dominant pattern.
Simply waiting for a dictator to die is a bad strategy for fighting authoritarian regimes.
O8: What about institutions, work, and retirement?
A: What if our familiar cycle of “school – university – work – retirement” breaks down? I would say: great!
Even now, that cycle fits reality poorly: people change professions, study in adulthood, and return to the labor market. You have probably experienced the difficulty of choosing a profession at a young age yourself, because according to that old model you were supposed to choose once and for all — and even now, people can still be shamed for trying to find themselves or for leaving a position.
And older people entering retirement do not always have it easy either. Some grew up within this linear model of development and devoted their lives to a single vocation, which they now can no longer practice. The meaning of life may simply disappear, and a person may find themselves alone and miserable in a rocking chair.
The linear model of life is a product of the industrial era. It was convenient when life was shorter, work was more standardized, and education was rare. A longer life would allow us to have repeated cycles of education and many career possibilities.
But that is only if you look at the world as a static picture. In reality, AI and robotics are not going anywhere, and it is obvious that the labor market will at the very least change radically in the coming years, if it does not disappear almost entirely.
UBI — universal basic income — may emerge. There would be no need for a separate category of “retirement”; income would always be there, and scarcity would recede into the past. This idea has both pros and cons, but since this is an FAQ on immortality, I will not go deeper into it here and will leave it for the FAQ on AI.
As this point and the previous two show, social problems are determined not by biological age as such, but by rules of access to power, property, education, career transitions, the structure of the economy, and so on.
Death today may function as a crude compensator for bad institutions, but the problem is not the length of life — it is the structure of our society.
***
That is all for today. If I made mistakes anywhere or offered weak counterarguments, I would be glad to hear your comments and suggestions on how to strengthen them. Wishing everyone an immortal future!
https://qr.ae/pCLZia
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/02/death-for-everyone-before-inequality-for-anyone/