Technology

A Blunt Look at Simplistic Immortalism

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That Superior Feeling, Serdar Yegulalp, on the limits of Immortality and Immortalism

I see only two ways for this to be possible. The first is the one Steven and I have explored before, where the resulting life is not life at all, but a stasis that we can call life only at the great cost of pretending that nothing was ever lost in the first place. The second method is where the costs of living are abolished only by way of force and dominion over others, exercised not just once but unceasingly.

Serdar’s response to my post on “The Hell of Heaven” is based on Barrows Dunham’s Man Against Myth – a book I have not read, but clearly need to, as he explored dangerous myths left after WWII.  Some of them sound all too familiar, as he explores a world where a few men tried to sacrifice many for godhood/racial godhood.  These are just like what I see in the quest for what I call Simplistic Immortality – “me immortal,” which often fit Serdars second method of immortalism in the above paragraph.

The rest of the post subtly explores the repercussions of the quest for Simplistic Immortality, and that eventually all bills come due and all plans collide with other’s plans.  Serdar handles this with great delicacy.  I on the other hand am willing to sweep subtlety aside to state things bluntly:

The quest for Simplistic Immortality, that of “I stay I and no one can affect it” makes every person, every phenomena, and the entire universe either the Immortalist’s enemy or slave.

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Transhumanism: Building a Better Reincarnation

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In this blog I’ve expressed skepticism about transhumanism despite being something of a transhumanist myself. I’ve been skeptical about ideas of immortality, about the risks, and that some transhumanism is really just a hope for a kind of techno-secular heaven.

My concern roughly is that transhumanism too often becomes a race to preserve a limited sense of identity, when that limited sense of identity may actually be what we need to transcend. I take this inspiration both from observation, and my studies of oft-referred-to, little-understood thinking by Buddhists and Taoists.

Or to be blunt, a lot of deep thought about human identity is that the human identity, that is identifying with a transitory mind and ego, is the core of most of our problems, and maybe we ought to seek to deal with that first. Uploading our brains to computers and such can kind of wait because this “us” we want to preserve is part of the problem.

The ultimate question of transhumanism is one of identity – and how we deal with that.

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