Immortality

[LB-chan]

Generic Troll Name

L.B.-chan

Even though you have your mind, would your lose your emotions and feeling?

Why would you have to? All your emotions are in your mind anyway, so you wouldn't lose any emotions, you would only gain added physical ability. Not to mention, robots can see, smell, hear, and touch, just like we can, so why can't we use that same kind of technology and have it send input to the brain?

You do have a point. I dunno, I just can't see myself in any other way but human. Thats just me.

Is there a downside to this immortality? Wouldn't you get bored after awhile and evenutally shut yourself down?  

[Thaxul]

No matter how tmpting immortality would be, I wouldn't take it. Living forever isn't all that great. You'd get extremely bored, the world would wither away while you stay the same, it's not that appealing to me.  

[Generic Troll Name]

Quote:

Wouldn't you get bored after awhile and evenutally shut yourself down?

And

thaxul

You'd get extremely bored

It all depends on the person, I guess. If you were planning on just sitting arround doing nothing then yeah, I'd assume that it would get boring.  

[Thaxul]

I think everyone would get bored after a certain amount of time of watching everything die around you. If not bored, than tired with depression.  

[E_Night]

if i could spend eternity with someone i love then bring it on. I would actualy love to live forever.  

[MightyWeresquid]

Death doesn't scare me. The only thing that does though, is seeing all of my loved ones die before me (I'm the youngest of my family.). That would be torture. sad

As for the immortality thing, I think it could be possible with the right kind of technology... We might not develop that until some time in the future though. neutral
Or... maybe we have I and I just haven't noticed. ninja  

[Dathu]

ZOMBIFIED!

You know, I just heards someone talk about the possibility of immortality. He said that cancer cells are immortal. Since they're mutated and grow uncontrolably, they didn't develope the "code" that controls aging. Theoretically if we can duplicate this, we can "breed" children that will live forever. Weird huh? I mean, regardless of wether or not we can weild it, immortality does exist in nature. Kind of creepy huh?  

[Theophrastus]

One view.

Should you live for more than a lifetime, you would shed your original identity within a few decades.

Imagine how lonely a person feels when they turn 100? All of your cultural memes are dead. Almost every contemporary is dead. The authors, the playwrights, the musicians, the politicians, all dead.

You have your children and family, if you're lucky, but they have their own lives to lead and the older you get, the more strange you would seem to them.

How much more if you're childless? The last survivor of your family?

100 years - depression. Imagine watching world powers shift between continents. Mighty buildings and landmarks being destroyed? Decades of your life reduced to a joke or a postage stamp? Movements, loyalties, behaviors you'd never seen and were strange to you.

The technologies that made your subsistence are now the recipient of derisive cackles or blank stares. And without anybody or anything to whom you could anchor yourself, would you really have an identity at all? Without a context is there even a "you?"

200 years - the whole world would have changed. You'd be bitter, by then, friendships starting to grate on you and politics looking more like cleverly disguised orgies of lies, death and subversion on an infinite scale. With a line of sight that's 200 years broad, you'd begin to see the world as historians, able to summarize with harsh brevity the strides of human progress that once left the world in awe. You could quite well sense shifts and revolutions in the world, and possibly predict their outcomes.

350 years. Life is brief and perhaps, for a time, you'd find your sympathy for human life rekindled, though not empathetically - pityingly. You'd deign to entertain human-like relationships, but your outlook would be too different. The jading effect of being treated like a living library would still be taking its toll, and it's quite likely you'd have some sort of mental disorders pulling down on your mind at this point. You would have cast off your body long ago and become partially or completely inhuman. Or, even if you had sustained your original flesh, what did itmatter? What you ate five years ago is part of your body, and that body didn't exist five years before that. Always refreshing, always changing.

500 years plus. Ennui. Total disinterest in the human game, in life, in reality. You'd have likely swallowed and regurgitated every philosophy and world view, and if you somehow hadn't managed to lose your mind and hide from the weight of centuries, you would likely be a very alien mind, indeed. Unable to value life, seeing humans as tools, either to be used as replication machines for DNA or extensions of a larger societal organism.

You'd likely be tempted to start playing the game, too - to make the persistent and subtle moves that would implant new ideas, cause alterations of the mainstream. You would take mild amusement in forcing revolutions and making the whole world into Chess, but never feeling a tug of concern, your emotions long dormant if not dead.

And for this, you would likely be killed or kill yourself. God forbid you felt the pangs of sympathy or a desire to be human at this point, because the one thing you couldn't do is go back.  

[ProjectOmicron88]

I agree with Theophrastus. Immortality has always seemed to me to be a curse rather than a gift.  

[Arios V]

ProjectOmicron88

I agree with Theophrastus. Immortality has always seemed to me to be a curse rather than a gift.

It is a curse, at first it's awesome, but after watching all your friends and family grow old and die, you would start to feel unimaginable sorrow and grief which would eventually drive you mad.  

[Sanguvixen]

The thing about immortality though is that things die so that others can exist. If nothing dies, than nothing can live.

I think the idea of immortality is nice and all, but I worry about the reprocussions with breaking a natural cycle that is perpetuated so that life can exist, and can continue to exist.

If everyone were to eventually become cyborgs, eventually there will be no more real human beings, and no births...and that could spell disaster, or at least I think so.

It would sort of be a curse to as some others recently brought up. If everyone were to be immortal...that would be a different story.

 

[Dark_lord_15]

Dathu asked someone to make a thread for him? Weird...

 

[Arios V]

Life must feed upon life in order to survive. Without a natural cycle of life and death, nothing will exist.

I know I'm just repeating what you said, but it is very profound and worth repeating  

[Meirelle]

Why would you want to be immortal?

God, life would get so damn boring. gonk  

[Theophrastus]

Though if we follow the concepts put forth in stories like Ghost In The Shell and are able to digitize ourselves, and put ourselves into bodies that needn't die, it seems the next step for our self-image would be something like melding minds as Motoko did with ...well, if you haven't seen the movie, I won't ruin it for you.