We Need to Die

The headline argument hinges on the size of infinities to assert that you'll run out of goals to live for eventually, and thus will eventually become vacuous and despondent over an infinite timeline. But this reliance on infinities is also why they cannot propose a concrete age limit for the Logan's Run Law their gut so desires. May that remain the case for infinity.

Some counter-shower-thoughts:

Are children's lives vacuous and despondent? They have no sense of mortality, no sense of limits, no comprehension even of the fleeting nature of their childhood, and honestly they aren't really striving for a goal the way an Everest climber, or even the average salaried worker, is. Maybe there's more to the meaning of life than striving towards a lofty-yet-grounded-and-pinpoint goal?

Are dogs and cats given longer legal lifespans than humans because they seem happy enough without this vaunted sense of mortality and strife?

Why are Everest summiters or retirees left without goals to strive for, when they've only achieved one or less? That's tangential to Williams' proposition! Is it not because they have too little time left before their "dead"line to forge and pursue a new one, particularly given the toll of aging on mind and body? That seems like the opposite of the point the author's trying to prove.

Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness soon resulting in accidental death. Finally, for all we know there is a long tail of obscure disease processes that only kick in after lifespans no one has as yet ever reached-and even though that too might eventually be solved, if it takes you a thousand years to find the first case of such a disease, how many will die from it before you find a cure?

> they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway.

How is that a bad thing? Are you the same person you were when you were 15? Of course not. Is it the case for when you were 20 or 30? No. The whole point of living is to learn, gather new experiences and grow. Would you stop doing that because you are immortal? No.

I think author is caught too much in his work whatever it is. Me, personnally would love to meet my grandkids and their kids. Learn and try do new things for dozens of years.

Would this be bad to see the wolrd or even other worlds if we could be able to visit other planets?

I think the main problem is that people are getting old and unhealthy. My grandpa was living for 92 years and I saw that he is miserable. He was fine mentally but his body was failing him. Imagine getting up in the morning and everything hurts. You try to go to the bathroom but your hand are shaking. That is the problem.

At some point you just do not want to live anymore. Because it is just suffering.

There have been many, many stories over the millenia that try to empart the wisdom that mortality is necessary. Some present it as being a gift.

I don't think any one source made it click for me, but I think some combination of watching The Good Place, Sandman, and a lot of Black Mirror got me really stretching my imagination of what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.

There's also this PC game called The Coin Game that's just a solo-dev making lots of arcade games. They exist on an island where you have a home and some hobbies and a few arcades and I think even a mall. But the entire island is devoid of humanity. There's just a bunch of robots. I don't know if the game has a backstory, but the one my brain filled in is that this is a sort of playground for you to live in forever... and it's got a San Junipero feel, but far more bleak. Gave me the chills. I'm happy to be mortal.

The author's argument seems to be a practical one and two-part: 1) without death, there's nothing to motivate us to live life well and 2) unless we live life well, there's no point in living.

I just disagree with both postulates, and that's fine. The author can go on thinking that life needs to be something specific in order for it to be desirable. I myself like being productive. I also like eating fast food every once in a while. I think I'd be able to go on living (with some happiness to boot) if I never had another productive day or another McD's burger ever again.

Life can be its own end. If we manage to end death by aging, someday there will be children who have never known another world, and they'll marvel at all the death-centric thinking that permeated the societies of their past.

Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes.

I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.

Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.

In sum, the author proclaims that without human death, nothing people do has a time limit so people wouldn't have any incentive to do.

But this is false - even if we were a sovereign observer only, the universe is constantly changing and evolving, species go extinct, the seasons are never the same. And we are not just observers, we are also actors - we have opportunities to create today which will not be available in the future. You cannot create the Internet today, it already happened. You cannot spend arbitrary time traveling to and fro across the galaxy to talk to friends, the molten iron geyser you wanted to see at Betelgeuse will no longer be running by the time you get there. Perhaps time motivates us, but our death is not the only thing which limits time.

This is like worrying about the sun going supernova after you've just discovered fire. Yes, eventually Earth will be reduced to a blackened cinder. And yes, if humans managed to live forever, there would be unforeseen (maybe bad) consequences.

If I get to live to 200, I still won't worry about it. If I get to live to 1,000, maybe I might start to think about it. Fortunately, by then, I will have had 1,000 years of experience to maybe come up with better answers than now.

Can you imagine the hubris of telling someone who has lived for 10,000 years that death is good because you can't think of what you'd do with that time?

Moreover no one is talking about making it impossible to die. No one is going to force you to live forever.

And that's the real problem for the nay-sayers. They know that they don't have to live forever if they don't want to. They just don't want other people to live forever. They want to live in a world where other people die.

> Bryan Johnson is an interesting case here. If you take the longevity project to its logical end, you get someone who's stopped living in order to keep living - for the most part not eating food he enjoys, not drinking, not doing anything spontaneous, all in service of more years.

I never understand this type of critique of Johnson. It's framed like he's suffering daily for his project, but the guy sounds happy as a clam - especially contrasted with his pre-Blueprint podcast with Lex Fridman.

Seems like he's doing something right.

If you have an evening to burn, 17776 by Jon Bois[0] is a surprisingly captivating multimedia story/project about this topic. It speculates about a future Earth where people have been immortal for thousands of years and explores what happens through the lens of absurd football games. Previously discussed on HN in 2017[1].

[0] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714607

You might start questioning meaning of life with a billion year time budget. A million years seems reasonable to cover the range of things you could anticipate wanting to learn or experience. A few thousand years, no, that's not enough, you have to start cutting corners, you can barely even visit nearby worlds and only cover a few intellectual disciplines.

I've had this (often drunken) conversation many times, I think mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human condition, but the fabric of our universe. Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die, we should die. This memento mori makes every day, ironically, worth living. One of my favorite verses from the Bible is Job 1:21, where he somehow reconciles this tragic finality with trascendent faith:

    “Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
        and naked I will depart.
    The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
        may the name of the Lord be praised.”

What do you mean ‘we’

I don’t identify with anything written here.

> Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows?

because I want to. Don’t you have things you want to do? Don’t you have desires? I don’t want to do it tomorrow, I want to do it now.

> When everything is possible, and nothing is urgent, with no real consequences for time misspent, what do you even care about?

Same thing I care about now - seeking pleasure. There are so many positive, enjoyable, pleasant, pleasureable, exciting, thrilling, gratifying, enlightening, edifying, joyful, enriching, uplifting experiences - I could spend a lifetime pursuing them and never even come close to enjoying them all. Even if I had a thousand lifetimes, by the time I finally finished off the list I started with, there would be exponentially more that had been added since I started.

In all honesty, reading this, I think something is wrong with the author. He does not love life the way he ought to, and that’s a shame, and I resent that he’d project that weakness, as if it’s somehow insightful or laudable or applicable to me.

Immortality is absolutely not compatible with our current capitalistic social system. Whenever you see startups and rich guys financing research in that domain, there is never any talk about giving it away to hoi polloi like you and me. Death is the last economic redistribution system still standing - and when you see they are doing everything they can to nullify any inheritance tax, you can imagine they don't intend to give away anything - fortune, position, power - once they become immortal.

And imagine the North Korean or Russian dictators (or American "President") having access to the technology.

Why the focus on immortality? I don't want to be immortal but I'd take a few thousand years.

That aside, I think longevity-skepticism is still mostly adaptive. I haven't seen any concrete progress and the people who are true believers are a. getting their hopes up and b. tend to be really gullible/easy to manipulate. We should ideally be skeptical enough to avoid those traps but hopeful enough to pursue genuinely promising research.

I think this is almost completely post-hoc rationalization.

It's a lot easier to accept death if you believe it's a natural, necessary, good thing. And since we're all going to die, this post-hoc rationalization makes us feel better.

>You can see this in retirement, actually. There's real data showing mortality spikes in the years after people stop working. The structure of striving, even when it felt like a burden, was providing something that leisure alone can't replace. People who stop pursuing things often just... decline.

Or maybe people stop working because their health was declining?

> And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows? Just as you "remember your death" to really live life, perhaps we need the deadline to do the work at all. Death is what pulls us out of pure consumption and into pursuit. You could call it "just a deadline", but I disagree. It's what makes us begin.

I'm not sure it's transparently bad that we could defer everything indefinitely. Why would that matter? Also, it's not certain that we would. Perhaps we would get very bored and then be spurred to action.

For me, the biggest tell was how frequently older people report feeling completely at peace and ready to die.

As my own life progressed, the feeling of novelty became harder to find, and then less important. Grief became easier, death became lighter.

As I deepened my investigation into the nature of my own experience, I started to realize that "I" do not exist in the way that I originally assumed, and I started to wonder what we're even talking about when we talk about death. Who or what is dying?

The self, time, and consciousness are not well-understood in philosophy, science, or the experience of most people, and as such, most conversations about immortality are really about something else.

"The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish."

-- The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin

Interesting, but I disagree with the main premise. I am currently not motivated not because of my coming death but because I am frustrated when things are bad. More time would give me more time to be frustrated. I simply don't think that things will be great or boring just because a lot of time passes. Things change at a speed that adaption alone can occupy any one of us forever.

Two major counterpoints, the second borrowed from de Grey.

1. I am young enough that a sense of mortality is not a true motivation to start things now. While I know about my mortality, I do not, in the visceral sense, believe it. My motivation to start things now instead of later is to experience the rewards sooner, not a foreboding panic of losing finite time. I suspect this is true for at least very many people.

2. The argument doesn’t survive a simple inversion test. Let’s concede every single disadvantage immortality might bring— lack of motivation, innovation, housing. Suppose we already live in that world. Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?

A funny thing I realized: immortality is incompatible with spending a nonzero fraction of my life with children.

I treasure the time I spend with my kids. I can see that this season will be over soon. This won't be my whole life, but it will be a significant fraction of my life. If I were immortal, this would be a tiny blip in the inconceivably far past for 100% of my life.

You may think I could start again every 100 or 1000 or million years, but if a nonzero fraction of people did that, that would be exponential growth. Even ignoring resource constraints, you cannot sustain exponential growth of any kind in a 3D universe.

A universe with kids necessitates a universe with death.

The punishment for crimes in Altered Carbon was sending you to a far enough future so you know nothing and no one. With age you get alienated in a similar way, maybe adding (lack of) understanding on the mix. Your brain have limits, your adaptability have limits, your physiology have limits, pushing them forward doesn't take them out. Eventually you get tired, bored, or want to get out. At least speaking about most and not special cases (I hope).

And having a simulation of ourselves in a different media is a different game.

Everything that has a beginning has an end. It would be really cool to live until whenever and realize that given our poor capacity to recollect past events we humans are actually the goldfish of the universe. No death means you only remember hash of events that are so distant in your past which is basically how you felt. After some time of life you start to only remember your feelings without recollecting much details about the events.

Derren Brown's book "Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine" (which is much better than the title might lead you to believe) does a very good job exploring the philosophy behind this.

The choices we make have meaningful and value in large part because we sacrifice a fraction of our finite time and attention in order to do them. But once you have infinite time, then the value of everything you do becomes zero.

We need to force change to encourage growth and exploration. "Science advances one funeral at a time" acknowledge this but that doesn't mean actual death is needed. We need to create strong systems that encourage forcing people, and processes, out in everything we do. Term limits, retirement, etc etc. Nothing should have a 'forever' clause to it because nothing is forever.

I'd be a von neumann probe if I could be eg. Bobiverse

To me the "revelation" came via Emil Cioran's book "The inconvenience of being born" (the actual book's title in English is "The Trouble with Being Born", but I like better the term that's closer to the French original). Excellent justification.

Living long enough to see everything else die while pseudo-immortals try to fight entropy-particularly with the much worse coming consequences of human civilization borrowing heavily against the ecosystem- is a hell I don’t think I would want to see. Like the author, I’m not opposed to extending a bit, but… I suppose that’s a slippery slope. Today “just a little longer” seems reasonable, and then it will be just a little bit longer, and then a little bit longer after that. I suppose at some point after that you risk becoming little more than your dwindling ego, something of a lich lord or revenant jealously draining the world of life because you’re too afraid to admit: you don’t matter (no one does in the grand scheme of things) and the universe wasn’t designed for immortality or to appease your ego. In the more practical and nearer term, I fear life extension will be more a matter of trading quality of life simply to avoid dying, a form of life support. Doesn’t sound good to me.

when you put “we” in title it makes it sound like you think other people should die not just yourself.

I don't think there are is an issue with finding ways to extend life. But there is an issue with people clinging to life out of attachment; part of getting older is accepting change & the flow of things.

I try to live life by the following lyric:

All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.

Endeavor to touch and see everything. Therein, you'll discover quite a lot about you and all else.

the 1973 essay can’t be found on that link, maybe provide an alternative :-/

_nobody_ needs to die, even assuming quality of living is maintained with age, and that one can live 1000s of years, that decision belongs to the self /jk

srsly, how is this an issue if everything in the Universe eventually dies, why wouldn’t we?

Nah I’m good. I’ll just hang out with my friends and play video games every day

This comment section is for some reason filled with truly incredulous takes, with many seemingly all too willingly embracing the inevitability of personal oblivion awaiting us at the end of our lives. I wonder what solace it brings to entertain the paradox of dying as a way to bring life meaning, and where it ranks between whatever the local pastor or suburb's heroin dealer are peddling.

I suspect our education system is at fault. Too many children in the modern western society grow up completely isolated from philosophical thinking and the teachings of both ancient as contemporary philosophers. As a consequence they never get exposure to the various deep, tragic, hilarious, and most-of-all diverse ways that we as humans have tried to build meaning into our fleeting lives, triumphant or struggling.

To me, this quote from the article best showcases the status quo:

> And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely.

If you agree with that, I cannot stop you. But maybe I can shake you just a little with a different, more individualistic viewpoint:

Whatever life you have, in whatever circumstances, is the one and only life that you do have. The way it has been is the only way that it can ever be, but the future is whatever you make of it, and it cannot be anything else.

Whatever you experience in life, is all that there is to experience. If you yourself don't climb a mountain, you will never know what climbing that mountain is like. And if you hear a tree fall in a forest but then forget about it, it no longer has made a sound.

Nobody else can do this experiencing for you: much like you didn't directly experience your parents' lives, your children won't directly experience yours. But as long as you yourself are alive, you get to experience your parents and children through the only single way that you can: through yourself.

And so to accept death for yourself is to accept the end of all experience that has ever been. It is to accept death not only yourself, but also for your parents, children, all the climbed mountains and sounds of fallen trees, and all life and the universe itself. For once the one singular entity in the entire universe that has been capable of experiencing is gone, it's as if nothing had ever existed.

So try to stick around and keep experiencing? There really isn't, and hasn't ever been, anything else.

Post-mortem survivalists may disagree.

If it wasn't necessary it wouldn't have been selected for, having nothing to do with the philosophical or spiritual significance. Those species that didn't age became extinct because their genetic pools were too slow and stagnant to adapt to environmental circumstances or non-adaptive altogether. Both of which are terminal at the species level. Evolution doesn't favor the survival of the fittest individual. It favors the continuation of life, generally.

That's been my concern; that solving mortality for individuals might be a death sentence for the species.

I want to see more writing like this in Century 21.5

The part about retirement is total BS. I worked hard to FIRE in my mid 50s as I had already over 300 books still to read by then, min 20 countries I still wanted to visit, two additional languages to learn enough to be able to read in original some of the books not having been translated in the languages I already know, and update my physics and math college knowledge from when I was younger. None of this was possible while working. And quite a few years later I now have over 500 books left (the original ones had tons of references which expanded a lot of books to a few more), still places to see, even in countries which I crossed out from the original list, but I could not completely traverse, or languages not yet mastered to the level I need.

This resonates with me. Too much of anything loses value. This includes life. If there's no death, it would take special individuals to make sense out of it.

Eh I’ll take my 78, someone else can have the rest.

The author talks about the how the certainty of death ultimately coming to all of us (sooner or later), gives us drive.

In terms socio economic issues of immortality, the Altered Carbon books (or the first season on Netflix), paint a somewhat bleak picture how immortality makes the rich and powerful even more privileged. Not to say it’s all bleak, but I would certainly say it’s dystopian overall.

Not the argument I expected. I'm also against people living forever, but more because it's a way for society to go forward and get rid of old ways of thinking. There's a saying that science advances one death at a time. And can you imagine a world where current leaders are still in power 1000 years later? Or where the leaders of 1000 years ago were still in charge? Whenever I hear people talk about living forever I think of how it'd be something tech billionaires and autocrats would use to oppress us forever. No thanks.

I've had this experience a couple years ago where I had to go under for a sudden/unplanned surgery. It felt like I should be worried, but I realized that I was 100% ok with not waking up from that.

We already live so much further past what our lifespan "in the wild" would be. Even ~75yrs is already excruciatingly long. I don't understand people who want to prolong it even further.

Widespread failure to die would cement culture in place, and the power structure. It necessarily would dramatically slow down cultural evolution, which strongly depends on funerals. Logan's Run had the right idea, just the wrong number. We old geezers must make way for civilization to effectively adapt to a changing environment.

Even if our lifespans become merely 200 years, imagine if the generation of the US Civil War era were still in power. Great age plus health equals social petrification.

One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.

Cool man, don't try and live forever.

Maybe people who haven't had their innate curiosity beaten out of them will get more resources to explore.

I just can't help seeing the same moral panic in this as I see in arguments against UBI.

It's like how many people with fuck you money have you met? I would say: "Trust me, humans do just fine without external deadlines or want." but it only takes like 30 seconds to find countless real people whose lives trivially destroy the whole line of argument.

How about this obvious counter point, making long term, 100 year research investments makes way more sense to any person who has the chance to see them pay off.

Right now this type of longterm thinking has only a few hive entities (RCC, governments, research labs) who can operate this way and we'd get a lot more exploring done if we can enable whatever percentage of the population was born with unbound curiosity to explore to their merriment.

Let's say you can rebuild telomeres while curing cancer and keeping arterial walls healthy, and even prevent the physical aspects of dementia or Alzheimer's. Who's to say that an immortal human can retain consciousness, let alone sanity? What would be the psychology of an ancient being? What happens to its memories, how could it recall anything from centuries past? And, as sometimes explored horror and science fiction, how would such a creature retain its humanity rather than becoming a hedonistic, nihilistic misanthrope that considers itself beyond petty morality?

I don't see how any sort of immortality can be supported by the infrastructure of the world. It's based on people dying, civilization has factored it in. How could you manage resources for populations that never disappeared? No immortal organism exists, I'm pretty sure Darwin already solved this question for us.