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Death in a posthuman age.
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Once we have entered the posthuman state, what might cause us to die?
Firstly, remember that transhumans seek indefinite lifespans, not immortality. The possibility of death is not eliminated entirely, it is just that your chances of dying do not increase as time goes by (ignoring 'in the wrong place at the wrong time' situations, where you chances of dying suddenly leap from 'negligible' to 'certain').
The first thing that might cause us to die is if we start exploring different personalities and happen to fall into the mindset of a suicidely depressed individual. This may seem a far-fetched proposition, given that mental illnesses will almost certainly be fully treatable, but your mind only needs to fall into a state where it finds the thought of living another moment intolerable once. Given millions, or billions of years experimenting with different mental states, it is always possible that the next one turns out to be your last.
The second cause of death can be attributed to the fact that individuals change over time. At the moment, we do not live long enough to recognise anything but a modest change from the person we were a few decades ago. But, what about a person whose lifespan is measured in millenia? Would a person of today see anything familiar about his future self, seperated by 10,000 years and countless experiences 'presentme' never had? Would that future self's mind have forgotten that long-distant self that s/he had once been?
Possibly, one might retain enough of their self-identity to remain in existence forever, but that seems terribly restrictive. It might end up like being on an endless loop, replaying the same constrictive life experiences over and over again. A posthuman would probably want to explore beyond the boundaries if its own identity, gradually (or quickly, depending on how eagerly it takes up the risks/rewards of personality sculpting) reforming itself into a mind so different from its original state that the former self cannot be said to exist anymore.
Anyone else got any more ideas about death in a posthuman age? |
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Re: Death in a posthuman age.
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Interesting thoughts.
If one allows uploads in the posthuman condition then I'd probably assume that one's chance of dying decreases over time - what with backup copies in different sites, multiple streams of consciousness that get integrated, etc. "Wrong place at the wrong time" quickly grows from needing a thermonuclear device to go off nearby to kill you, to needing multiple such events to kill you, to needing the planet to be destroyed, to needing the solar system to be destroyed, just to kill you. All of which are progressively less likely.
With personality exploration happening to grant you a suicidally depressed state at some point, perhaps we would add fail-safes into our cognitive architecture that prevents such mind-sets from carrying out any destructive acts or else resetting you back to "normal". But timescales being as they are, who knows, one might well expect suicide to be prevalent. Certainly, if a posthuman desires their own death, it will probably be as easy as Ctrl+Alt+Del.
There are two interesting distinctions with individuals changing over time equating to the "death" of the person that existed before the change. Firstly, I look at this as a similar scenario to what happens as a child matures into an adult; does a child see any familiarities with the adult they may / will become in future? Maybe, but they'd be slim. I think its a similar thing with our future post-human selves, and with the high likelihood that we will record everything that happens, there will always be a shared history, a memory-chain that connects past and future selves. Just like a (much) higher fidelity version of the memories that link all of us to our childhood selves.
The second distinction is perhaps the more interesting. As per my namesake I see our minds as meme machines, endlessly copying, recombining, and transmitting thoughts / memes. As this process accelerates and increases into the future, and as we explore different lives and mental states, combine and link with different people and generally engage in cognitive gymnastics currently beyond us, we run the risk of merging, at some point, one and all. A massive species-wide pool of endlessly circulating, interacting, copying, recombining, thoughts / memes . . . bits of minds being swapped, added, removed . . . very quickly with the "individual" simply disolving into the whole. I'm not sure "risk" is the right word here. This . . . thing . . . would still interact with and control the world. And records of particular minds, of individual collections of thoughts/memories/memes would probably still be recorded.
"Selfhood" is deceptively fragile and a lot less permanent than most people think.
The one other possibility for genuine death in a posthuman world that I can see, is another posthuman with a desire to kill you. No matter how unlikely or difficult or motivated, left unhindered a fellow posthuman would have the capacity and ability to find you and all the separate bits of YOU and destroy any trace there was of YOU. |
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Re: Death in a posthuman age.
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Meme, good thoughts. If memes are the social counterparts of genes, extending from processes of replication with survival as the main goal, then survival becomes less of a goal for memes driven purely by the force of a near immortal being.
Most likely that "heaven' or "Nirvana" or some such are the creation of a genetic system that seeks to "upload" itself into a permanent state in which death is not to be feared. The goal, from that perspective, would be an eternal state in which no change is needed or expected, thus giving greater force to the religious organizing capacities of the genes here on earth, that have to deal with the problem of survival and the need to control change.
What would a meme be with no genes to generate the collective needs of survival? probably disappear with non-use.
What would "life" itself mean if its opposite, death, was no longer to be considered? If heaven is the dream of that which perpetuates the genes, what is there to perpetuate if no more death?
If no more death, no more need to perpetuate "me", no need of immunity to limit my choice to preservation of "me". No death, unfortunately, means no life, at least as we know it now. |
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Re: Death in a posthuman age.
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Once we have entered the posthuman state, what might cause us to die?
Volition.
At some time, it is time to be self-caused and let the old cause off the hook, some could call it leaving the nest, or simply taking responsibility and stop giving credit that is neither asked for or wanted, or blame as a case may be.
What is a posthuman state?
Is it post post-human?
How many posts do you need?
You can argue it's just semantics, or get specific enough to distinguish one act might not follow the other. Para-human or a para-modernist is defined by Donald Theall as meaning any cultural that is neither modern nor postmodern, but can be classified as either/both).
As modern is defined as now, there is no getting away from it, except as escapist fare, and any future speculation is merely a change of costumes and a lingo that changes arbitrarily and is contrived to a notion of being novel.
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