I’ve spent time with friends and relatives who were 80+, many of whom told me them were tired of life and ready for “something new”, they had good lives but had enough.
Sure if they had younger bodies they might feel differently but most were quite able bodied and just felt it was time.
Yes, many people don't enjoy life, especially when their health deteriorates. I'm saying that to me, the fact that your health gradually gets worse until you die is a bug.
> Perhaps you should be careful what you wish for ?
Were they as able bodied as they were aged 20-25 though? If 80 years is the cutoff at which we get bored with staying alive, would you rather spend those 80 years in a "biologically" 20-year-old body then make the conscious choice for "something new" or gradually deteriorate for about half of those 80 years then die without the choice not to?
The major religions all try to answer the question of death. Singularitarianism answers it by pointing to longevity research and saying death won't happen, that death is a bug (despite being omnipresent in biological nature and in accordance with entropy), and that anyone who doesn't adhere to this belief is an evil deathist.
Children. And death. You can't have the former without the latter indefinitely. And you need the former for progress to happen. Old people aren't merely a less healthy version of young people. They're also people who have settled mentally and now they DEPEND on the environment staying the way they're familiar with it. They will try their best to prevent change. This means children can't thrive & take the next step. Notice I've not mentioned yet also that we can't have infinite people on that planet. But we can't, anyway.
Ugh. That's not really a solution, and you're generalising way too much about old people being stuck in their ways. While some definitely are, they're not all like that.
Condemning everyone to death, even the not-stuck-in-the-mud old people sounds pretty abhorrent, or maybe "tragic" might be the better word.
> Notice I've not mentioned yet also that we can't have infinite people on that planet.
Well, fortunately there's more than a single planet in this universe.
How feasible it becomes to live on planets-other-than-this-one over time is clearly not something we can say with any certainty at the moment though.
Hopefully that works out to be possible (in some good way), otherwise we're stuck with what you're suggesting. Which would suck. :(
This reads kinda like "these facts are getting in the way of blind hope."
Be extremely suspect of patterns of the kind "we'll do X now, which will work when we invent Y far in the future". Say, electric cars can use clean energy now, so they'll be clean when we move to mostly clean energy in the future. OK, but today they indirectly run on oil, gas & coal. Or "we'll work on immortality now, which will be fine when we spread over the galaxy in the future".
These things need to co-happen at the same time, instead of dooming us all to a fruitless endeavor only to then realize the second critical part of the equation may never happen the way we thought it would.
Did you know your neurons can't go through mitosis? You can't regenerate a damaged brain. And it does get damaged in time, nothing can fix that. When you use something you wear it down, it deals with harsh environment that the organism tries to prevent as much as possible, but something's gotta give eventually.
When I said people settle mentally I didn't mean it CULTURALLY. I meant it BIOLOGICALLY. In ignorance one can claim that dead neurons may just get better and maybe we'll find ways to make them regenerate, but that's because they're clueless, so every implausible scenario seems equally likely to them as what's plausible.
In theory, a "life" may be possible to factor so it's infinitely flexible in infinite time. Whatever that life is, it won't be human at all. It won't be you, or anyone your know. We're built the way we're built and you can't change this without losing yourself in the process.
We have an 80 year old president in the US, Trump was also old, Putin is old, Xi is old, everyone is going incredibly old up there among the ruling elite, and may they be blessed with great health and all, but even when healthy, their decisions are firmly planted into the 20th century, you can't help that. And this matters. It's holding us back and in some cases threatening world peace and safety.
And by the way! The reason our biology makes us SETTLE DOWN in our concepts, knowledge, behavior, is because the alternative IS EVEN WORSE, and it is degradation, mental illness, loss of memory and so on. This is not about some problem with our health. It's a problem of entropy and it includes also machine models, not just human brain: https://www.nannyml.com/blog/91-of-ml-perfomance-degrade-in-...
We're all doomed to "either die a hero, or live long enough to see ourselves become the villain". I prefer to die a hero, and let other heroes grow in my place. How about you?
You're mocking my supposedly outdated knowledge in an argument where you're the one who claims age and prior learning doesn't affect the ability to learn new information. Clearly zero self-awareness, I suppose.
What I said stands. If you need the details, adults see specialized neuron reproduction in he granule cell layer of the olfactory bulb & the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. The connectivity of these neurons is also strictly local. It's unclear if there's purpose to these divisions, or it's merely a sign of imperfect specialization & process.
If you wanna play with DNA and make forever living tumors, you may change this limitation. But as I said, the result won't be a human. And it will absolutely not be you.
I said "you're not trying to solve a problem, you're trying introduce problems into a working solution".
I see I got downvoted up there, as if I'll steal your life by openly sharing a valid opinion. Humans are such a sorry species sometimes.