This beautiful passage was written by Christopher Hitchens before he found out he had cancer, in The Portable Atheist. I think it’s quite profound and true:
Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
Nor do I.
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Didaktylos
September 22, 2012 at 9:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This life is all there is. But it is also all there needs to be.
lancifer
September 22, 2012 at 9:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I expect nothing more, but another go round might not be so bad. It would also be great to see the people we love, that have died, again.
I think this is a large part of the appeal of some religions that promise an after life.
I’d love to hear my grandmother’s laugh again.
Wings and a harp? Well maybe just the wings.
machintelligence
September 22, 2012 at 9:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That is what religions sell, the promise of eternal life. There is no evidence that they can deliver on that promise, but for most people the promise alone is enough.
Faith is just gullibility, dressed up in its Sunday best.
Michael Heath
September 22, 2012 at 9:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Christopher Hitchens writes:
Death is currently certain but perhaps, not certain for some people living centuries from now. Not necessarily for infinity, but well beyond our current biological limits. I have no illusions I’ll be in that future set of “somes”; but I can visualize the technological roadmap which makes this prediction feasible.
Marcus Ranum
September 22, 2012 at 10:18 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Death is currently certain but perhaps, not certain for some people living centuries from now. Not necessarily for infinity, but well beyond our current biological limits. I have no illusions I’ll be in that future set of “somes”; but I can visualize the technological roadmap which makes this prediction feasible.
No, death will remain a certainty. It may be possible that a simulation of a dead person, indistinguishable from them, may continue. There will be those who will want to cling to their illusion of life after death so strongly that they will re-define what ‘death’ means, in their desparation. The words “copy” and “original” will be avoided in favor of “continuation” and “uploaded image” or “backup.” If people can fool themselves into creating gods and imaginary afterlives in the heavens, they will fool themselves into believing a simulation of a thing is the thing itself.
Reginald Selkirk
September 22, 2012 at 12:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I want a pony.
heddle
September 22, 2012 at 12:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Well not purely statistically speaking. Given that about 10% of the people who ever lived are still alive, there is a non-negligible statistical uncertainty that death is inevitable.
Of course when you throw in what we know about biology…
lancifer
September 22, 2012 at 1:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Marcus Ranum,
What makes you think your current moment to moment state of consciousness is anything different. Does the fact that you have a biological wrapper gives you a feeling of continuity?
Given a long enough time most of your (living) cells will have been replaced. Your central nervous system neurons are not discarded and replaced, but the component parts are replaced as needed to prevent the accumulation of damage: for example, the lipids of the cell membrane or cellular proteins are continously renewed.
Your “consciousness” is an illusion. It is just your brain transitioning from short term memory to long term memory, and your “memories” are just chemical traces imprinted on your neural net.
You may have some sentimental attachment to that meat sack you occupy but “you” are no more “there” than you would be if an electronic neural net contained the same information.
Unless you think you have a “soul”.
Marcus Ranum
September 22, 2012 at 2:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What makes you think your current moment to moment state of consciousness is anything different
I don’t. But if we’re talking about a simulation of a person it may think it’s that person, but the person will be dead. It won’t be identical, either, because it won’t possibly be able to record and “experience” the death and dissolution of the original. The “uploading” scenario involves making an exact-as-possible copy of the original, which will then think it’s the original, and destroying the original or allowing it to die. Suppose the process is halted partway through: now you have a copy of “you” as well as “you.” You’d say you were “you” and the uploaded version was a copy of you, that thought it was you. Or you’d invent a whole new language of you-ness that avoided the dread word “copy.” But it’d still be a copy, not you.
I’m quite aware also that none of the original molecules of “me” are still present in what I think of as “myself.” I’m not a copy, though, because there has only ever been one version of “me” at any given time, and the replacement of parts, fortunately, occurred below the level of my awareness. If we humans experience copy/version upgrade it’ll certainly redefine our idea of the self, but I suspect it’s more probable that we’d think of the new copy as a “child/self” or something like that. Looking at another creature and thinking “that’s me” explodes the concept of selfhood.
Dr X
September 22, 2012 at 2:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Interesting comment, Lance. It goes to the heart of the question: is there, fundamentally, such thing as a self? In fact, some of us talk about “disorders of self” which are connected with the illusion of self-continuity. A variety of deficits in adaptive capacity may be associated with instability of that illusion.
Marcus Ranum
September 22, 2012 at 2:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
PS – I don’t think selfhood is anything special and I agree it’s an emergent property (or an illusion)
All we have to do to achieve agreement is to say that we might “experience immortality” i.e.: have the sensation of endless continuity. For all intents and purposes we might call the experience of immortality “immortality” though I’d prefer to call it “virtual immortality” or something else entirely, because “mortality” would thereafter only be something that happens to our original bodies.
Right now, because of the way our bodies replace themselves in very small increments, we have that sensation – at least until it ends. While one entity (the copy) experiences uninterrupted “life” the other one (the original) experiences a very real “death” no matter how pleasantly it may arrive.
Perhaps we might call the original body the “prime” or something. Then, we might call “uploading” “passing the prime of life” or something nice like that. I just prefer not to lie to myself.
andrew
September 22, 2012 at 4:01 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
True, but I sometimes want more of it.
Armored Scrum Object
September 22, 2012 at 5:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There’s a huge difference between the certainty of death generally (which I think is what Hitchens’s is addressing) and the inevitability of “dying of old age” within the fairly narrow time frame that is currently the norm. Mind uploading/copying cannot avoid the first and is not necessary to avoid the second. We currently (albeit scarcely) have the ability to edit a computerized copy of a genome and synthesize the result into a living cell. We need not upload or copy any more of ourselves than that to seriously consider the possibilities offered by engineered cells, tissues, and organs. Lifespans measured in centuries wouldn’t put us anywhere near the realm of ugly-bag-of-mostly-water transcendence.
Even so, as long as people mysticize and/or fetishize conception and death, as the leading religions encourage (and as some of the nonreligious do anyway), even fairly conservative research in that direction will probably have trouble gaining social acceptance and might not actually get very far. After all, it would be unconscionable to “play God” and create a world full of “designer babies”, right?
lancifer
September 22, 2012 at 6:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Marcus Ranum,
Looking at another creature and thinking “that’s me” explodes the concept of selfhood.
True. But I guess the moment you create the copy the two copies occupy a different space and diverge as far as experiential memories are concerned.
Let’s say we created a tele-porter (yeah, I know a really big leap there) and it was designed to obliterate one of your atoms just as an identical one in the same state at the other end (OK maybe that’s inconsistent quantum mechanically but for the sake of the argument…) was created. But something went wrong and instead of destroying the original it just copies it.
The “passengers” are both unconscious during the process.
The tele-porter crew sends the second “you” back, still unconscious. The two “you”s are put in a room alone until they wake up.
Which one is “you”? Why? If you say “the original” and there is no physical way to tell which one that is why are you saying that? Both “you”s have identical physical bodies and identical memories.
I must admit that if I knew there was such a tele-porter I would be reluctant to climb in.
lancifer
September 22, 2012 at 6:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Dr X,
A variety of deficits in adaptive capacity may be associated with instability of that illusion.
But since it is just an illusion are the people having issues with maintaining the illusion ill or are we?
sunsangnim
September 23, 2012 at 3:00 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t need to live forever, but I’m curious about the future. It would be nice if somebody could at least give me a short synopsis of the next few centuries or millennia before I die. When you look at all of history and the way the world is today, it’s a fascinating story of triumph and tragedy. I want to see where this train ends up after I step off it.
savagemutt
September 23, 2012 at 9:54 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
After reading all the thoughtful comments about the nature of consciousness I have come to a single, definite conclusion.
I also want a pony.
Marcus Ranum
September 23, 2012 at 6:07 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Which one is “you”? Why? If you say “the original” and there is no physical way to tell which one that is why are you saying that? Both “you”s have identical physical bodies and identical memories.
The “original” would be the one that existed first. You know, the one from which the “copy” was made? That’s implicit in the idea that the atoms’ state (of the original atom) was copied; I suppose the definition of “copy.”
I wish I could write fiction worth a damn. This gave me a fun idea for a story. It’s in a future in which people have the experience of immortality via replacement “golem” bodies. In order to address the question we’ve been talking about here, a newborn’s original “prime” body is transitioned to a golem at around 2. One nice side-effect of this is that any neuro-abnormalities are tweaked in the process, so kids all grow up with nice neuro-normative behaviors. Anyhow, our hero wakes up one day to discover that something went wrong in the golemswap process and the version of him that was supposed to be superceeded (incinerated atomically) wasn’t, due to a software flaw. So the golemswapped self walked out and went home, but the version that considers itself to be the “original” him is still alive and kicking and stunned by the whole thing – he goes out to try to get assistance and, of course, they try to restrain him so that they can destroy him. He doesn’t like the idea of being destroyed very much and runs for it. Then, the police (motto: “the law is your friend!”) do the only thing that makes sense: they ask the golemswapped self “where would you go, if you were trying to hide from us?” Our hero realizes that he has probably been dragooned into hunting himself, and lays a trap for himself based on his knowledge of the kind of thing he’d fall for. Eventually he rather violently “superceeds” the golemswapped self and agrees not to sue for injury due to the software error in return for not being prosecuted for killing himself. And the story ends when he goes back to be golemswapped and they don’t use the data-set from the current self (which has had all these bad experiences) – they use the version from before the copy/fail incident, thereby making the entire situation never have happened at all.
lancifer
September 23, 2012 at 11:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I like the plot.
kermit.
September 24, 2012 at 10:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Uploading a copy of one’s consciousness to a computer or golem is not the only way to extend one’s life; there is also the possibility of not dying. I see no fundamental reason why a biological body cannot be repaired and maintained indefinitely. Of course it will still die eventually, but that’s true of any physical support for a mind that we can think of. No matter how durable, the universe itself will end someday.
I’m not sure I need hundreds of thousands of years, but I know I could go for a few more centuries of what I’ve had so far, given the choice. Ah, well.