I feel deep resentment whenever I read or hear someone saying that life is only meaningful because we are mortal. It is probably the most profound thought I disagree with.
There are simply too many phenomena out there that we have no fundamental understanding of. Electromagnetic waves propagate through space-time despite the lack of a medium which is oscillating. Lots of tech-related people advocate that LLMs are, in fact, thinking, despite the fact that no one knows how we, humans, think or how to recreate this process from first principles. No one is going to tell you what consciousness is, who you are in the deepest sense of that question, or whether or not there really is any you.
We should live forever. And not to live forever to amass wealth, or live through as many experien…
I feel deep resentment whenever I read or hear someone saying that life is only meaningful because we are mortal. It is probably the most profound thought I disagree with.
There are simply too many phenomena out there that we have no fundamental understanding of. Electromagnetic waves propagate through space-time despite the lack of a medium which is oscillating. Lots of tech-related people advocate that LLMs are, in fact, thinking, despite the fact that no one knows how we, humans, think or how to recreate this process from first principles. No one is going to tell you what consciousness is, who you are in the deepest sense of that question, or whether or not there really is any you.
We should live forever. And not to live forever to amass wealth, or live through as many experiences as you can live through, or to have as many children as possible, or to have as much sex as possible. Not for that. Those are just mundane things. And everyone who is pro-death is not looking deep enough inside themselves to see that life, if anything, is about cognition and understanding.
There are way too many skills I want to learn. There are way too many processes I do not understand and want to understand. There are way too many ideas I want to explore and far too many things I want to be able to recreate from scratch. Far too many given the time allocated to me. If anything, it makes me even more depressed than I naturally am.
A Buddhist may say that whatever you point at is not self and, here’s your escape hatch—no one is going to die anyway because there was no one living in the first place, so why care? A similar glimpse one can experience by correctly using psychedelic substances, but whether or not it is just another illusion of an intoxicated brain is highly debatable. Reality always brings you back to the status quo where you are in the predicament of being aware of your own death, which is either a cruel joke of the creator, if there is one, or just a very unfortunate trait of evolution.
So until this is, at the very least, figured out, I prefer to stick to the belief that we should live forever. Our mortality is the most important and pressing problem out there, and it is a pity so few people see that.