Yet we remember the name and works of Homer, almost 3000 years old.
We only have 2 books out of around 16 from Homer, so a lot has been lost already.
That's a fairly close correlation to the claim in TFA!
How many people alive today will people know of in a 1,000 years? Or maybe 200 years? Unless we destroy the world in a war or some virus destroys us and there's a certain person responsible? From 1000 years ago I only know a few names.
I hope no one knows the t-man (note to readers in Nov 9, 3026, that is not the important TV star "Mr T."). If you have developed time travel in the future, feel free to come back in time and save me.
And that guy Ozymandias, the statue reduced to legs and a boastful plaque, and all around only desolation.
That guy will go with us to the Stars and be immortal through that poem, paradoxically.
Let’s assume he was real. What’s the benefit to him that he’s remembered?
This is not a rhetorical question. Maybe some of your offspring has higher chances of survival if you’re remembered?
Some spiritually inclined might see it as becoming "eternal" as long as the memories of their existance on this plane are passed down to future generations, they're in a sense "immortal".
Best you can do when we're all destined to become stardust.
The immortality of gods it's not so much they didn't die, but that we still remember and tell stories about them.
If you're here to leave a little mark on the universe while at it, the bigger the mark reverberations, the "better" you did with the hand you were dealt off
Why would it need to benefit him? Couldn't it just as well benefit us?
we even remember Ea-Nasir
Yeah, except Homer is likely ahistorical.
And the Trojan Epic Cycle contained eight epic poems. We just only have two of them. We've also lost the rest of the epic poems. We have a fraction of what was considered great even 1,200 years ago.
I'm disheartened that the immediate first response to you is basically "no, humans will be immortal soon enough."
Of course, nothing is immortal. All matter in the universe will eventually be subsumed into supermassive black holes, then spend the next thousands of quadrillions of years slowly evaporating into nothingness via Hawking radiation. I would very much like for my life to be longer than it is, to possibly witness the entire arc of all human civilization, but I sure as shit don't want to experience eternity as undifferentiated non-baryonic matter causally disconnected from all other matter. Death may come very far into the future for certain types of life that don't yet exist, or certain types of information sinks that can act but would not have been considered "life" by existing biological definitions, but it will still come, and if you live enough, it will be welcome.
Personally, I take a lot of comfort in this. Not a single one of us, not Charlemagne, not Khan, not Elon Musk, matter any more than an amoeba in the truly grand scheme of the cosmos. Even a hypothetical type III civilization is just as much dust as the Mayans in the long run. Conversely, within our own little sphere of influence, we all matter as much as a god.
I get why life has this ambition. I feel it, too. It's the reason we exist in the first place. But we're able to recognize it for what it is, the illusion of an imperative handed down by semi-random behaviors selected for no better reason than they made it more likely for their associated genes to proliferate. There is no actual imperative. That frees you to live within the confines of a tractable life of tractable ambitions. Be the absolute best person you can be to a small group of sentient creatures you happened to exist alongside for somewhere between a few decades to a century. Don't set the planet on fire and neglect your own family in an attempt to become a comic book hero.
I don't care about absolutes.
Give me 500 years of life with good health and I will be more than satisfied.
Until year 499. We need eternal life, not pretty long life.
I think if humans were biologically immortal we'd eventually get tired of living and wish to exit the world on our own terms. This could be longer or shorter than a human's current average biological lifespan.
We also need universal good (otherwise eternal life is hell).
Summum bonum, for those who want more.
We aren't turning to being good as human beings though. Hard to tell if we are getting worse or we have always been this way. Actually, it's not hard to tell.
You might want to read Cordwainer Smith's take on immortality, such as "The Rediscovery of Man."
That's a temporary state. Eventually humans won't die. Consciousness will be uploaded, memories preserved.
We aren't that far away from being able to decode thoughts, memories, and the visual cortex from brains. That's going to leap forward quickly.
Maybe the future will reverse the light cone and revisit everyone and everything that has ever lived. Maybe we're in their simulation.
Maybe the reason we don't see alien AI swarms is because they don't travel in spatial dimensions.
All sci-fi conjecture and fantasy, but brain scanning will get good.
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Edit because HN rate limits me:
> And then in 10^33 years you'll fight viciously for the last pockets of negentropy.
Our physicists claim to have models of how time began and will end. They don't concretely know. With the new observatories, new models are being suggested and old ones discarded. Will Lamda CDM hold?
We still have infant eyes. So much lies beyond the limits of our detection. And frankly, projections of the end of the universe are doomer-coded because society is looking for it to be that way.
Oh god, dictators that live forever. Wealth that can be amassed and hoarded across a billion natural lifespans. Orwells boot stamping on a human face for eternity made real.
Death is a feature not a bug.
Probably not a realistic view of the future, since those dictators won't need citizens.
> Probably not a realistic view of the future, since those dictators won't need citizens.
Oh the dictators will still need citizens, but only to stomp on their human faces forever.
What's the point of being a dictator if you cannot actively demonstrate your abuse of power on and in the presence of other people?
Up to now all dictators, oligarchs, billionaires died or more preferably were actively destroyed.
> Death is a feature not a bug.
You have fun with that.
> dictators that live forever
The world is more free than it has ever been, and it's getting better.
Looking at facts and data, OP is right.
Ofc we don’t feel that because our current present seems so fucked.
But objectively it’s the best present there ever was.
This doesn't even make any sense. 'Uploading your consciousness' means you are given two tools - a brain scanner and a gun with one bullet. You're still dead. And the chatbot created in your likeness will also inevitably find itself getting wiped as well.
Life, and consciousness, is absurd enough (yet certainly real) that I'm fully open to the possibility of further absurdities happening once we die, but I think it's an absolute certainty that we're all going to die. And accepting this is quite important because it rather dramatically influences one's life philosophy.
Meat isn't magical. There's nothing supernatural about a brain. It's all clockwork machinery all the way down.
A digital copy of a mind is no less alive than your children. They are, after all, nothing more than lossy copies of yourself.
But a digital copy of you isn't you.
I find I'm actually happier accepting a little nihilism in my life, knowing that at some point, I will die, and within a couple generations of my death, I will be completely forgotten.
This isn't depressing, it's freeing. It means there are no long term expectations of me, so I should I just spend as much time as I can doing the things I enjoy.
I'd agree with the premise, but I had a different conclusion. For me realizing I'm going to die, emphasizes something else. We're on this Earth for an ridiculously brief moment in time. And as you age time only goes by faster and faster. And so to me it emphasized the need to make sure there's another generation of humans to come after us. It led to a bit of an obsession with fertility.
That's probably about as realistically close as we'll ever come to being able to transfer your consciousness. But it's even better than just transferring your consciousness because it comes with the added of benefit that the 'new you(s)' have every chance of being even better than you, especially if you pick a good quality partner and raise them well. I don't care if my distant progeny have any idea I ever existed, but I want to give them a chance to exist, and I'll always be some small part of them anyhow.
Distinction without a difference. My consciousness, my sense of self continues uninterrupted. There's no meaningful difference to me. You might care, but your opinion has zero weight on my own opinion of who and what I am.
One fudamentally cannot know the mind of another. Your opinion is based on incomplete observation and assumptions. Your insistence that a digital copy isn't me holds as much weight as the assertion that you aren't real because you exist only as text on my screen.
> My consciousness, my sense of self continues uninterrupted.
That's the part I directly dispute.
I don't dispute that a computer could become conscious, but I'm not convinced you could transfer your consciousness to a machine. If a brain scan copied your brain, that would not be the same consciousness that you have now. It would be like having a twin, and twins don't share a consciousness.
Exactly this. Personally I would dispute a computer becoming conscious, but it's inconsequential to the argument. Even if it does become conscious, that consciousnesses is not you. You haven't transferred anything. You still die, and then have a chatbot in your likeness.
For a technical issue I'd also add that this entire thing is becoming increasingly absurd given advances in understanding of human biology. Discoveries like the gut-brain axis emphasize that the concept of brains in a shell is mostly naive. Your body and your brain are completely interdependent to create 'you'.
But again I think the objections around consciousness or technical possibility are completely inconsequential (if not also strong arguments in their own right). Even if we accept every single point and desired outcome, you still die.
I suppose parent comment is addressing the version of you that doesn't wake up inside a computer. If a biological vetsion of you exists, then that version won't be the same instance as the one in the machine. There will be two copies.
Machine-you would no doubt be thrilled. How does bio-you cope with not being made immortal? If your answer is "It doesn't matter, throw the original in the trash" is that murder or suicide?
> But a digital copy of you isn't you.
I'll go further: a future biological you isn't necessarily you.
There's a continuity of being as we grow and age, but that's not enough to assert identity.
Identity is a useful (to our genes) mental fiction.
That doesn't mean that uploading is possible. The algorithm implemented in neurons likely depends heavily on specifics of neurons. One could implement something non-biological that would be similar, but similar isn't identical, and identical is what you'd need for uploading to look like "me going into silicon" and not "something that's kind of like what I was is now in silicon".
So why not just have a kid or two? A chatbot that sounds kind of like you did is no more 'you' than your kids are.
Then make a brain without access to other brains or things made by other brains.
Consciousness will be uploaded, memories preserved.
Preserved maybe, but never viewed by anyone. They might as well be gone.
And then in 10^33 years you'll fight viciously for the last pockets of negentropy.
That sounds sufficiently different from me that it won't be me.
If I'm going to identify with some future entity that's very different from me it might as well be something newly arisen, not something having a copy of some of my memories somewhere.
I guess those archived memories are the ultimate time capsule. If that becomes common they'll ultimately go the way of all archives.
Relevant recent SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/chip
But we can already do that now. Your brain can export information that my brain can read. This comment is one way how. If you can read my thoughts directly it might be more detailed but not much different.
Consciousness will be uploaded to where, some digital prison that also has resource requirements the same as a biological entity? Since you are leaping into the fire with such confidence I will exhort you with a counter proposal to seek Christ.