We've wrecked our habitat and keep most of humanity in some form or other of slavery, and there are exactly zero credible social movements aiming for another course. Why would we want to watch this deterioration and tyranny go on for centuries more?
As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes.
If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe.
Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me.
Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?
> You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments.
No it's not. If you accept "mind is brain" (i.e. consciousness is a phenomena within known or knowable laws of physics), a digital virtual environment that simulates the laws of physics (to arbitrarily good precision) could have brains (and therefore minds) running inside it that are indistinguishable (to arbitrarily good precision) from the real thing. [1] [2]
> currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
I'd sure as hell rather be alive now than in the 1800's, or the 1700's, or the 1600's. Or the Middle Ages, or classical antiquity, or ancient times, or pre-history. Life sucks for billions of people compared to Western standards but life's also better for billions of people than it's ever been before. Humanity's mostly made forward progress over the long arc of time, and I'm skeptical of claims that such progress is doomed to permanently halt anytime soon.
[1] I could replace "to arbitrarily good precision" with a proper mathematical formulation. But the technical details of the epsilons and deltas don't affect the thrust of the philosophical argument. I'm happy to leave a more precise epsilon-delta phrasing of my idea as an exercise to the reader(s).
[2] Of course the equivalence goes both ways; I hardly need to explain to HN that it's possible to build digital computers in our analog universe!
> I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory.
Actually, I would say the opposite is deeply religious territory. Nothing fundamentally restricts this unless you think the analog nature of a neuron is a pre-requisite to consciousness, and no synthetic/digital consciousness could ever exist. But you have no reason to believe this. Such a belief is almost religious.
> where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source
This is life today as well. How do you know you aren't part of some Matrix-style biological mind prison? You don't. It's pointless even trying to wonder.
> Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though
Social problems can be fixed. Death is final. Tyrants existing is not a reason to promote the death of billions of innocents. If Putin lived for another 1000 years, I certainly wouldn't kill myself. You will experience more net social progress being immortal, though it may be slower, than dying after a short 80 years.
I mean, you've given me an abused Russell's teapot in an attempt to mirror my position, just like a Jehovah's witness or charismatic christian would. At the very least you should hypothesise that you could anchor an argument in quarks and then pick a conceptual level of matter at which you believe you have enough control to be able to fully simulate human corporeality.
If you could it'd be very, very slow, because your machine needs to embed more than the representation of the system you aim to simulate. Among other things to correct for the different complexity, similar to how you need to juggle ten extra decimals or rounding rules just to be able to compute 0.3 * 3 in the browser console.
I know that I'm not in a Matrix style prison because I've experienced pharmacologically induced dissociation and other disruptions of the nervous system. If my brain was a tube floater hooked up to whatever machine you're fantasising about, then I'd have noticed, just like I notice that I'm dreaming if I for some reason turn lucid when sleeping. You could, of course, spend so much time being introverted and deep in your own fantasies, e.g. by stimulating your brain with screens, that you lose the ability to discern between real and virtual settings. Some might claim that this is an ideal and spend their lives practicing such techniques in cloistered, monastic environments.
I did not "promote the death of billions of innocents". I claimed that watching the current trajectory play out isn't obviously attractive, to refute the opposite position, that it should be the "#1" priority of contemporary state administrations. But if you want an argument for death, sure, I'll give you one, because it's trivial. Death is part of the human condition, it is fundamental to who we are and always has been.
If you take it away, then we are no longer human and lose our connection with human history and recorded experience. Is it better to be a human than to be a machine? I'd say yes, because machines cannot have liberty and freedom, they're dead already.
The assumption that there will be "social progress" under conditions where people no longer die would need a very strong set of arguments for me to accept it. Currently, that we are born and die exerts a pressure on our rulers and injects volatility into our societies. If they instead could just say 'alright, we'll make things better, just wait a millenium', then they would. They are already very good at erasing dissent and the memory of previous dissenters, to a large extent by substituting for it with false ideas, or 'false consciousness'.
The assumption that "social progress" is inevitable has a religious background, it has its immediate roots in Enlightenment deism, i.e. christian protestantism, which were inherited by liberalists and early marxists. This position has suffered a lot since then, mostly because of modern takes on science, but also the global effects of mass extinction, disruption of the atmosphere and so on, which is quite tangible evidence against this view.
Whether eighty years is long or short from your perspective is up to you. Perception of time is highly elastic and especially under dissociative states you can feel like you've experienced centuries pass by. This is routinely exploited in televised media.
As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes.
If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe.
Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me.
Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?