I don’t remember where I heard this, but someone once drew an analogy between living forever and playing at your friend’s house as a kid. If your parents told you to live at your friend’s house forever, you’d probably hate that idea, but when you’re there having fun and your mom comes to pick you up, what do you say? “Let me stay 5 more minutes!” Similarly, if some genie came and offered you 10 more years every time you were about to die, you’d probably take it, whereas the thought of accepting thousands of years sight unseen is much more daunting.
@@maalikserebryakovin his scenario with the genie, you practically couldn't die. Because the genie showed up to you when you're about to die and offer to get you out, would mean that in the time you accepted, you wouldn't die, because you accepted that time. Now if you accept a thousand years and there's no possibility to die... I don't know what happens in the next fifty year, so a thousand years of possibly war, terror, etc. can seem daunting. But in reality, there's no such thing as absolute immortality, there's always a way out.
@@maalikserebryakov Under what conditions would you gladly accept a thousand years of life? I would certainly require universal health care, including dental, vision and hearing aids. I am a senior citizen and the aging process is not a walk in the park for everyone.
The people talking about living forever as if it would be tedious are unimaginative, the worst case scenario living forever is having to physically reset your memories once in a while so that you can experience everything over again.
Sure, it sounds cool.. at first. But there are more questions. What about health? And more importantly, what people we love? I think that after 150, maybe 200 years, the person would be mentally detached from the reality.
@@tjblues01Aren't we already becoming more detached from reality, though? And most of the things that are responsible for that current state are the developments humanity has had. It gives the implication that getting more and more advanced is just a way for us to be closer to all the things that are further from the base of humanity and the human experience. Detachment from reality and the gain of other things like knowledge, quantity of experiences, stacking on self gratification
@@unendingvoid Yes, in some ways we are detaching ourselves from reality. But it's more by choice. However what I talk about is something else. It seems to me that you've made extra assumptions; for ex. you assume that your brain is going to be in the perfect shape of 25 yo for those thousands of years. Maybe, maybe not. You seem to avoid my questions about loved ones. What would bring a joy to your life when everybody is gone (including your children)? Knowledge, quantity of experiences, stacking on self gratification doesn't cut that. Have you visited any nursing home or just retirement home? You know, those ppl still have sharp minds but they prefer to stick with one another of the similar age. Not because they don't like younger... They just have nothing to talk about with them. And now imagine that are the only one who is 500 yo surrounded with 25 - 50 yo kiddos. To me it sounds like hell.
@@tjblues01 so, first of all, this is the longest humans have ever lived in the history of humanity, our average lifespans just started getting to 70-90yrs depending on the country because of access to technology and good healthcare. Before now, the average lifespan was just 40yrs old. Would you be happy living to just 40yrs today? No. When the technology becomes available, everyone would see living longer as normal, loved ones and family would also live longer with us if no deaths by accident. And more importantly, it’ll all be in good health too because the technology is there to ensure no organ failures, and if there is, we could have regenerative health care where any failing organ just gets regenerated.
33 here. I used to feel like life was rushing by in my teens and early 20s, but the past few years have been the longest of my life. It isnt age that makes life go by fast, its routine. You need more honest engagement with the world around you, and exciting and risky situations, new people to meet, new things to learn. Life feels like it is rushing by because you are bored
@@renlysotherlover294 Following your passions pays more than jobs do. They tell you it doesnt because they want you to work, but look at everyone who makes money and what they do
@@renlysotherlover294 Well, even if you have to work for your passion: Do you do that? Or do you some comfortable routine to get by day by day? If you prefer comfort over passion, it probably isn't.
@@VampireSquirrel The reality is that many people aren't capable of doing their passions in a sustainable manner. "Look at everyone who makes money and what they do" is taking a very small sample size compared to the size of a nation, or many nations, or the earth. Like, it's a sample size of 10s of thousands, or maybe 100s of thousands vs billions. We are not at that level in our species development either. Who knows if we will ever get to that next level...or what that level even is.
As you get older, each year, month, day is a smaller percentage of your total life. That's why time seems to go faster. And as you get into old age you slow down and everything starts taking longer so you get less done in the time you have. Depressing but true.
Exactly. But in a virtual world it won’t take you longer to do things. And while the percentage thing is true, you may run out of things to do with that much time. I know plenty of elderly people who are already bored of life and just waiting for death. Some people aren’t interested in learning new things. And there’s a chance the human mind can’t even handle remembering that many things so after a time you’ll just reach a max or start forgetting year early life. While I’m sure there will be some people who want to live forever. There’s likely many others who would get bored eventually and want to die.
I disagree. I think it's mostly that as you get older you do less stuff and especially less new stuff which makes it feel like the days are smaller. During Covid I didn't do anything and I felt like I blinked and was two years older. Now I finally got my shit together and for the first time in my life, on my birthday, I was surprised only one year passed, it felt like it was more.
The percentage thing presumes that we live to the standard life expectancy. Really it’s just that the brain stops noting stimuli that seemingly does not change and so time seems to go by faster. When you’re a kid, everything is new. If you lived a life with plenty of variety, then time does go pretty slowly. Meditation also really helps, as you aren’t zooming through the day. Buddhist monks remark that time seems to go so slow for them,
The exponential feeling is true. Think about it when you are 5 years old, a year of your life is literally a fifth of your experience. But at 25 years old, a year is 4% of your experience
I believe because we're so interconnected today, the deluge of information and experiences we have totally accelerates the feeling of time passing. Before cell phones and the internet, life for me was very much living the moment-to-moment experiences, even the mundane ones.
@@ron4tron kind of. Even though there's not much information we can't get, you can experience new things in order to slow down time, like learning new skills. Also, activities that allow the flow state are great for slowing time too, like playing an instrument or playing videogames. If you can successfully match what you're doing with your ability at that task, you'll get that very pleasant sensation of just being in the present.
100%, talked about the same thing elsewhere @@brunosarramide572 👍Though, great point bringing up the flow state, too. I think it's all great to keep in mind, especially when as the OP says, more people find themselves just passing the time, what feels like rapidly. The internet and everything being connected is awesome, but I & many others have probably gotta find better balance to live "longer," and more fulfilled lives.
ABSOLUTELY! To see how everything changes?! It’d be amazing! Only 250 years ago was 1776. We have a really good idea what life was like then. Vastly different! Imagine Ben Franklin living that long.
I don’t know if I’d ever get over the fear of death even in times that I actually want to die or stop existing. But I feel like if we were to become with our human minds as they are, ancient, many of us would find peace just like how many old people do today. you can accept that you could’ve done something better and still have “no regrets“. Because of the acceptance and if humans were to live forever, that wouldn’t necessarily mean everything else would. Someday you might feel like you don’t need one more death of a dog or a cat or some other pet that you’ve been replacingevery short 10 to 15 years
Even if I’m also on the side that thinks people will cling less to life after living for a million years, I really appreciate how fast he answered “no” to Alex’s question
I'm 53 and it seems like i was 20 yesterday. I wish we had more time. I don't believe in a after life so for me I'd love to stay as many years as i can.
I hope I can brainwash myself into religion. Which I just don’t feel like it’s possible with my current understanding of the world. Philosophical and scientific theories/evidence fill my head. The god helmet experiment reaffirmed my belief that god is lives in the mind ever since having these existential/ontological ideas shared with me by my hippie uncle when I was a little kid. I cried every night at the thought of everything and everyone including myself just not existing anymore. I almost had a nihilistic attitude towards life ever since my 20s when I was able to cope with… youuu guessed it… the same psychedelic drugs my uncle was high off of. Aha what is life?
I've never felt Life was precious. And now I am in my 70s. All those decades of my love of playing baseball and softball and other sports has caught up to me. Those old injuries cause daily pain and it only grows as the years pass. I have no desire to go beyond our limited time.
Yes, but with some caveats : - I remain in good health the whole time ( not much fun being basically a plant for 900 years) - My family and friends get to live as long. Otherwise it would be a really boring existence - My dogs get to live to 100 at least ( ideally they can also get to 1000 )
At 25 I used the analogy of waking up 15 minutes before the alarm was due to go off and languishing luxuriously in the thought of having that extra 15 minutes (or whatever time, from an hour or 2 to 5 minutes) but on rolling over, it seemed, suddenly the alarm was going off. It was over. My point was that I thought life was going to go by like that, luxuriating in my youth but, roll over, doze a bit, and it’s nearly all gone. Now in late middle age I can report back. I was right.
I'm 65 and happily retired. Theoretically, I'd love a 1000 years. Of course, that's a simple outlook as we'd over populate the world, societal norms may change so much I'd feel like an alien on my own world... But again, I'd like to give it a try before refusing any offered life extension.
Just some perspective from an older guy. I remember having the feeling of time passing faster at around 24 and it feels like the pace has not quickened since then at least for me. It was like I was at one cruising speed and then through work I accelerated up to a faster but stable cruising speed. It's kinda nice. Time took way too long as a child imo. Remember waiting as a child? It was excruciating.
The ancient Greeks believed that the Gods envied humans for being mortal, because knowing that we have to die makes experiences unique and precious. If you know you still have 990 years to live you don't appreciate time with people you love as much. I lost my brother at age 26 and that really changed my perception of time and how I want to live my life. The uncertainty makes everything more intense and valuable. Also I'm thinking of my uncle who recently committed suicide. I don't think he would have wanted another 927 years of heavy depression and severe health problems. So from my point of view it's never so much about duration and mostly about quality of life.
I would be willing to bet that if we asked people how okay they feel about dying, we would see a bigger average of acceptance the longer their health/life span has been.
The scary thing is that in virtual reallity you don't have the option of killing yourself. What if a bug or maybe even deliberate programing of some evil person outside caused your virtual reallity become like hell... Than you'll be trapped in that hell for what seems to you as a 1000 years!
what scares me the most out of this kind of concept is its use for punishment. Imagine being able to sentence someone to 10000 years in a virtual jail in just one year of real life. It would drive anyone crazy
@@brunosarramide572 The idea was already used in some SciFi book / movies / series. In some they came out as psychological toast, in others their mind was frozen as well, and they simply woke up to a world where everyone they cared about was dead since centuries.
@@brunosarramide572i think it depends. You manage to prove to your brain that you are dead, you'll die. But surely a system that can generate such a complex VR to trick your brain will have some safe mesures to ensure the death is not that real.
83 yrs old and still at least 4 or 5 lifetimes worth of things not even yet started, so without reincarnation it looks like I am pretty much screwed. Best I can do now is just keep on plugging.
“Each of them wishes they could live a thousand years long! Yet to be granted such a long life shall not spare them from the punishment. God is Seeing of everything they do.” ~ The Qur’an, Sūrah 2:96
The thing missing from this proposition is quality of life. The speakers likely have fairly high qualities of life. However if you change the proposition to somebody who has had a very tragic life, who has seen a lot of hardship atrocity and/ or heartbreak- And the willingness to have an extended life very much likely changes. There are a lot of people who have the exact opposite attitude here; they just want life to be over already. Because they have had to deal with these sorts of things, or because they have highly nihilistic outlooks. If you've never had a truly wary heart it is easy to say that you would want to live forever. For myself much of what drives me to keep living is curiosity of the natural world. It is learning about and experiencing that natural world. Part of me likes having the idea of a hyperbolic chamber Dragon Ball Z style for your mind that you could use to grow and study, The other part of me asks what would be the point without being able to go out into nature to have a genuine experience of the real world. The idea that my mind would be stuck for thousands of years inside of a computer even one simulating the natural world, without the ability to leave on my own back into a body that is functional with a high quality of life would be absolutely horrifying.
We tend to miss out on a lot in this short life that we take for granted truly how much time we do have. Actually, we have a lot of time. It won't matter if we lived a thousand or a million, if we are unsatisfied, it's not that the years were short but that we didn't take the time to focus on the things that pass us by. This is to all, don't be shy, go out, party, have sex, start a business, spend time with loved ones
Yes. The imperative for any rational sentient being is to keep going. If you are worried about being bored, then you always have that option within those thousands of years.
It's important to understand that the actual contrast in the argument is between finite and infinite lifetimes. Then you have to consider the qualitative aspects of each.
I think the story of Numenor and its downfall is a really interesting and relevant exploration of this kind of thing, although I suppose those people also lived in a world where there were people who lived forever as opposed to just wishing it were possible. Either way, I always thought the Numenorians had the best deal in living for 200-odd years but if it's normalised, maybe yeah you would just want more
@@Stopfief Iirc, with more new experiences, your brain has more to process. With more to process, you feel like things are “longer,” and that you have more time. It’s why an hour for children can be so agonisingly slow, but for adults, fly by in an instant. The truth is, the secret to a long life would be constantly experiencing new things.
This happened to me when I turned 10😂 I was like "There's 2 stages of life: single digits, and double digits, I'm now in the second and final stage of life" or something to that effect, so I basically had a mid-life crisis. Which in hindsight is some wild philosophy for a 10 year old hahaha
This is such an academic question... OK, not yet for a 24-year old and one in the thirties or 40s, who are still mentally fit. But we deteriorate, it is unavoidable. Our bodies deteriorate, get all kinds of wear and tear issues. And our brain starts to deteriorate. I saw my father with more than 90 slowly wasting away, having been the active one in our family. More and more forgetting things, starting to forget words, he wanted to tell you something, but could not express it anymore. His memory becoming more and more garbled up, in the end not knowing anymore where he really was, what his situation was. When people are more coherent when they talk in their sleep, when memories of the past are coming up, when you understand "Oh, now he is in the office, discussing some issue with his colleagues". That made me come to the conclusion that no, I do NOT want to live forever. Not that I would not want to experience how the world develops more, because I am largely positive in my base approach to life, but that final phase is horrible, unworthy, hopeless,
I don’t care what anyone says about the drawbacks I’d love to live to 1000 if my health would stay decent. Just being able to be an observer to all the changes would be worth it to me
You're missing something, the will to live. A friend of the family died last year, he was 87. We talked quite often about life etc. He told me about a conversation he had with his older sister, she was 89 at the time. He told her he was tired of life, he was content with the things he'd done, his work life, his family, raising his kids, but at 87 he'd had enough. He wouldn't do anything that might be considered suicidal, but he would be content if he simply went to sleep and never woke up. She told him she'd felt that way for about 5 years. I'm not saying everyone is the same, but if the human mind can get tired of living in 85 years, what kind of living torment would living 150, 200 or god forbid 1,000 years become? I know there's an old joke that says: who wants to live 'til they're 90? The answer: an 89 year old. But I'm not convinced old people want to extend life as much as that joke suggests. I think it was Ricky Gervais who observed: they say stopping smoking will add 10 years to your life. But it adds 10 years at the end of your life, that's not the extra 10 years we want! We want the extra 10 years in our 20s or 30s when we are young and active enough to benefit from them. We don't want an extra 10 years to start at 80, when we're confined to a wheelchair watching repeats of TV programs we watched when we were 20.
Obviously, if you're old and can't do anything, you wouldn't want to live much longer. When people talk about being inmortal or living 1000 years, they mean living that long being always young, that changes everything. If I'm young and I don't want to die now, why would I want to die in 100 years if I'm still the same?
alex is only a year older than me and i've been watching him for over three years at this point and it still boggles my mind how someone just a year my senior sounds like he could be my professor. his intelligence is inspiring truly
Experiencing 1000 of years in virtual reality only to be pulled out into the real world. Finding out that everything you did, all the things you had accomplished, the love you found, was all a fabrication. I don’t think I would be clinging to life either.
There will always be more to have, to want, to strive for. It’s better to reach for goals and then redirect when they’ve either been reached or become out of reach.
If you want to live longer, you might want to go back to a plant-based diet Alex 😉. See Dr. Michael Gregor’s books: „How not to die“, „How not to age“ etc. The only way we‘re going to live longer is if we start taking care of our health, and avoid the illnesses caused by animal consumption.
I have a feeling time will be like money. Some dysfunctional greedy people will want an endless amount. Others will be content and done at 100, maybe 200 at the most. I don’t think I could handle dealing with the amount of sh!tty people we have for 200+ years. I want to experience a lot, then be done. 150-200 max, then I’m ready for what ever comes next. Heaven or a slipping off into the void. I could use the rest.
The main reason I think you’d want to live forever would be to see how things end up. All of us only get to experience a brief flashpoint in history. It’s like only being able to read a single sentence in a ten thousand page book. There’s so many unanswered questions that we’ll never know the answers to. Like, will we ever discover life beyond earth? Where will evolution take our species? What happened before the Big Bang? The real curse of mortality is how much is left unanswered when we go.
I think we just forget how long we've lived. When we remember certain event a year ago, we already forgot everything that was in between, so it does feels like yesterday. People with dementia literally feel like and are convinced that a day haven't passed since they got sick. I feel like playing along with this forgetfulness is a waste. Let a person relive every second of their life and they would be more than happy to end it. It would be overwhelmingly enough.
But our brain is programmed so we just can't get overwhelm. No matter how fun or exiting the thing is in absolute, if you do it enough you'll get bored. Even if your day concisted of 1000 different exiting activities the brain would still get used and get bored and forgot most of it eventualy.
This is my nightmare tbh-because the mind ages. It is not built for those thousands of years of knowledge and strain. We would not be ourselves if we ever came out of that reality. Thats kind of why people use pass on immortality-it's not just the death of your loved ones, but that nothing will tether you to the identity you once called your own.
Alex always seems to remind me that there a nice young brilliant thinkers out there and there may actually be hope for humanity after all. We’ll see I guess.
I think it's less about the duration of life and more about the quality of life. If you're living in abject misery, with knowledge that there's no room for improvement later on, then there's not a lot of reason to desire to keep on living. You're out of options, and all you cab do is suffer. But if you are living and having pleasant experiences and there are things to strive towards in your future, you've got reasons to keep on going. As long as you have aspirations to do things, you'll want to keep living. The question is, how long can we play this game of identifying new things to aspire to achieve? Across eternity, you'll eventually do everything you can think to do. What's the point of winning the Nobel peace prize if you've done it a quintillion times before? Once you get bored of the game of life due to lack of novelty, that's when you're in a pickle, because you'd still have an eternity left to go if you live forever.
According to Yuval Harari, the point is not whether we want immortality. We'll reach it anyway because there's no net difference between perfectioning the cure of diseases and bettering human nature as a whole
Ideally, i want to live in roughly perfect health for as long as i feel like living. I am sure I'd want that 1000 years. That is really not a very long time. 70/80 year lifespan, where the last 10+ years rob of us health, function, and dignity is a cruel joke. I might maybe want more as i approached 10,000. But it would always be more important that I'd be allowed to opt-out if/whenever I ever decided to.
Life is nothing but a couple hundred memorable moments. I have no clue what occurred every single day during the year that I was 7, you probably don’t either. Maybe 1 or 2 memories from that year. The rest may as well not have happened
From *An Anarcho-Transhumanist FAQ:* "Life-extension is certainly not the entirety of transhumanism, but it is an important example of a struggle that we've opened and shockingly largely fight alone. The notion that an objectively "good life" extends to seventy or a hundred years but no further is clearly arbitrary, and yet such an opinion is both nearly universally held and violently defended. Many early transhumanists were shocked by the bizarreness and brazenness of this response, but it illustrates how people will become staunch proponents of existing injustices for fear of otherwise having to reconsider standing assumptions in their own lives. In the same way that people will defend mandatory military service or murdering animals for food, the arguments for death are clearly defensive rationalizations: *"Death gives life its meaning."* How is death at 70-years-old more meaningful than death at 5-years-old or at 200-years-old? If an eighty-year-old woman gets to live and work on her poetry for another five decades, does that really undermine your capacity to find meaning so badly that you'd have her murdered? *"We would get bored."* So let's build a world that isn't boring! Never mind the wild possibilities embedded in both anarchism and transhumanism, it would take almost three hundred thousand years to read every book in existence today. There's already 100 million recorded songs in the world. Thousands of languages with their own ecosystems of conceptual associations and poetry. Hundreds of fields to study on rich and fascinating subjects. Vast arrays of experiences and novel relationships to try. Surely we can do with a few more centuries at least. *"Old static perspectives would clog up the world."* It's a pretty absurd and horrifying to instinctively appeal to genocide as the best means to solve the problem of people not being plastic in their perspectives or identities. Over a hundred billion humans have died since the dawn of homo sapiens. At best they were only able to convey the tiniest sliver of their subjective experiences, their insights and dreams, before everything else inside them was abruptly snuffed out. People say that every time an elder dies it's like a library being burned to the ground. Well we've lost literally a 100 billion libraries over the course of homo sapiens. There are no doubt infinite myriad ways we might live and change, but it would be strange indeed if the sharp binary of sudden, massive and irreversible loss that is currently standard was universally ideal. This is an illustrative example in that it gets to the heart of what transhumanism offers as an extension of anarchism's radicalism: the capacity to demand unexamined norms or conventions justify themselves, to challenge things otherwise accepted. "
I've no way of proving this, but I've long suspected through the perspective of our aging years we are able to perceive spacetime relativity, of at a small scale. A new born experiences their first day, their second day doubles their experience, and halves the perception they had of a day. And so later in life, you see pictures of old celebrities when they were young and they look younger, often because you are older now than they were then, but you remember them being old. And this somehow applies even as they are getting older - you are catching up to them proportionally in time. Not sure if I've described that adequately, but maybe it's clear for some. As we age, everything appears younger because our relative perspective on time has accelerated. Or something like that. I'm not sure how to phrase it.
My 21st birthday I fell asleep in the snow in my backyard (Mich, Feb) and it felt GREAT. But my friends and family brought me in. I could see one freezing, but not THREE.
Nah, I am secretly relieved I will be long dead and forgotten in a 100. I mean, life is ok (I'm not complaining, as I've been lucky in many ways - and I plan to live my life to the natural end of it), but there still is a lot of suffering, and living longer doesn't really fix that.
I'd like the option to live forever as long as I can dip out when I choose. All this "immortality is torture, you'll see everyone you live die" stuff isn't putting me off tbh
If i could live for another 200 years whilst having good health, experience no illnesses etc i feel i would say no. I am here at this point in time and will deal with what i am fortunate to have, what is to come and reap what i have sown. I have never understood people saying they would want to live forever. I think a million years from now whatever civilization roams planet earth will highly likely be as different from us as we are to bacteria.
Guess you never found your "someone"? I would live with my partner forever, we never stop enjoying each other's minds. When you find that deep connection, it truly is "forever"...and you never want to lose that, in any length of time.
@@bernlin2000 What a wonderful thought. What an ideal existence. But reality is NOT ideal. The universe is constantly changing, and we are constantly changing. Our bodies deteriorate, it is unavoidable. Medicine cannot replace all of your body parts. And at some point your brain deteriorates as well. Unimaginable when you are young, I know. But go to a nursing home, and have a look. Talk to the people, how much is left of their mind. Don't worry, my saying is "Even when it is an unpleasant one, at least it is a distraction" from the monotony.
When you were five years old, the next Christmas was 1/5th of your whole life into the future. However, when you are sixty, it's only 1/60th. Hence, when you are older, time seems to go faster.
We are only 80 or at most 100 yr in this world. Creation was not finished on the 6th day but it will be finished when the new Jerusalem comes down from Heaven and, this world is destroyed. Then God create a New Heaven and a new earth with no distance between Heaven and earth. For God 1000Yr are just as 1 day. 80Yr for God is like 10 min. This world is a test. After this it is eternal with no more dead or pain but joy and Glory forever. If you have a wedding party you don't want a hateful neighbours on your party. So does God want Friends and not haters, they will be outside for ever with the Devil.
Personally, I wouldnt mind living forever, so long as I always had the option to end it. If cybernetic enhancements ever become a thing, you can bet I'll be the first in line
Fuck Alex is 24. I'm 26. I really have to get used to the fact that most online personalities and pro athletes are younger then me now. Shit getting older is a strange experience.
I want the choice to live forever. Also, if I am not allowed to bring more people into this world, that is also a choice I am willing to give up, given ONLY that people will generally be able to decide when to die rather than having that levied upon them
I'm currently on a mission to live forever. So far so good. The first goal is to become the oldest person in the world. Yesterday I set a personal best and I'm looking good for outliving the current title holder.
I know this is just a clip but what’s the purpose of this conversation? Is it discourse on the benefits or ills of living a long time? Or saying that the end is inevitable so what’s the point?
Anybody who says they feel as if time is moving faster each year, try and spend 20 hours a day looking at a wall. Guarantee you whittle down those 1000 years to a few weeks real fast.
Alex, are you guessing that perhaps humans may grow weary of existence? In lieu of debilitating disease, when has this ever been the case? Where is this conjecture coming from?
What about transferring consciousness to VR that could potentially be a man made heaven. We would also need to escape the earth before it's end and eventually escape the universe before its heat death or fix the limitations of the universe to create a recycling effect for our heaven to be eternal. We should also create a way to acquire the consciousness of our ancestors to bring them into our heaven. Blowing my mind.😮
If this sort of "thousands of years of experience in few seconds" situation came true, I have a feeling we would effectively experience everything that there is to experience within all the possible configurations of atoms in the Universe (especially if this VR allowed you to manipulate that reality without physical constraints) relatively quickly and then what? To a lot of people their life is defined by their children and no offense, that is largely just biological desire to procreate and leave some part of your genes around. With that gone, I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't want to stick around for effectively billions of years. Maybe this is why we don't see advanced civilizations, it's probably easier to reach technological level that allows you to hook your brain into some virtual reality than it is to effectively traverse the Universe so that's just what they all end up doing and either just live in there effectively forever or, yes, just end up killing themselves eventually as there's no point to linger on with nothing else to do and your "memory bank" full of all the possible experiences that there can possibly be.. Rather nihilistic, yes, but that makes sense to me.
If one believes in reincarnation (am personally unsure) or even the Christian notion of an eternal life after death, then wanting to live to be 1,000 isn’t an issue, it’s a given.
I think the difference for the real world, is that we age, both physically and mentally; to the point that for actual people who lived close to or past the age of 100 years old, their minds, memory, and ability to communicate begin to fail, if not completely So, if it were possible to live 1000 years under the same normal aging conditions it would be nothing but suffering a long torture
It would seem silly to throw it all away given the chance to live longer. Sure, if youre suffering horribly, it would make sense to end it all, but other than that...
I get what he’s saying but I don’t think either of them take into account what exactly you’d do with all that time. Most people who have given it any amount of thought know that immortality would be a horrible curse. However, death also doesn’t seem to be a good alternative because of two reasons: fear of the unknown and fear of missing out. Immortality fixes the latter because if you live forever, there’s a 100% chance you’ll do everything there is to do. When you accomplish that, the only thing left to do is die which you will eventually desire if for no other reason than to do something new.
@@bkwilcox23 Infinite time, sure. I meant more about living for 1,000 or 10,000 years. Infinite lifespans is such an abstraction that it's difficult to talk about in the same terms, and I think being immortal in such a way would probably necessitate changing oneself and one's consciousness so much that these matters of purpose doing things become null.
“But are you sure about that?”
“No”
Fair enough
Fastest no of all time 😅
that's a valid answer tbh
I love the honesty
Understandable have a great day
oh hi there, I know you
Such a wise and intelligent young man. He's only 24 and speaks better than most adults. Truly an inspiration.
this comment feels sarcastic @ 22 😂
Yeah he literally is an adult
i used to watch Alex’s videos when he was 17 and he still spoke this well lmaoooo
@@jeremuz_einsreal adult starts 30. Wise adult 40
"the years just fly by" -he says with a fancy accent
"Wow so young so wise"
I don’t remember where I heard this, but someone once drew an analogy between living forever and playing at your friend’s house as a kid. If your parents told you to live at your friend’s house forever, you’d probably hate that idea, but when you’re there having fun and your mom comes to pick you up, what do you say? “Let me stay 5 more minutes!” Similarly, if some genie came and offered you 10 more years every time you were about to die, you’d probably take it, whereas the thought of accepting thousands of years sight unseen is much more daunting.
I would gladly accept a thousand years of life. what’s daunting about it?
@@maalikserebryakovin his scenario with the genie, you practically couldn't die. Because the genie showed up to you when you're about to die and offer to get you out, would mean that in the time you accepted, you wouldn't die, because you accepted that time. Now if you accept a thousand years and there's no possibility to die... I don't know what happens in the next fifty year, so a thousand years of possibly war, terror, etc. can seem daunting.
But in reality, there's no such thing as absolute immortality, there's always a way out.
@@maalikserebryakov Under what conditions would you gladly accept a thousand years of life? I would certainly require universal health care, including dental, vision and hearing aids. I am a senior citizen and the aging process is not a walk in the park for everyone.
I'd jump at the chance for a 1000 years
The people talking about living forever as if it would be tedious are unimaginative, the worst case scenario living forever is having to physically reset your memories once in a while so that you can experience everything over again.
I’d wanna live to a thousand, heck, sign me up for 10k yrs
Sure, it sounds cool.. at first. But there are more questions. What about health? And more importantly, what people we love? I think that after 150, maybe 200 years, the person would be mentally detached from the reality.
@@tjblues01Aren't we already becoming more detached from reality, though? And most of the things that are responsible for that current state are the developments humanity has had. It gives the implication that getting more and more advanced is just a way for us to be closer to all the things that are further from the base of humanity and the human experience. Detachment from reality and the gain of other things like knowledge, quantity of experiences, stacking on self gratification
Get to 10k years, you'll be happily signing yourself up for 10m years, and so on and so forth
@@unendingvoid Yes, in some ways we are detaching ourselves from reality. But it's more by choice. However what I talk about is something else.
It seems to me that you've made extra assumptions; for ex. you assume that your brain is going to be in the perfect shape of 25 yo for those thousands of years. Maybe, maybe not. You seem to avoid my questions about loved ones. What would bring a joy to your life when everybody is gone (including your children)? Knowledge, quantity of experiences, stacking on self gratification doesn't cut that.
Have you visited any nursing home or just retirement home? You know, those ppl still have sharp minds but they prefer to stick with one another of the similar age. Not because they don't like younger... They just have nothing to talk about with them. And now imagine that are the only one who is 500 yo surrounded with 25 - 50 yo kiddos. To me it sounds like hell.
@@tjblues01 so, first of all, this is the longest humans have ever lived in the history of humanity, our average lifespans just started getting to 70-90yrs depending on the country because of access to technology and good healthcare. Before now, the average lifespan was just 40yrs old. Would you be happy living to just 40yrs today? No. When the technology becomes available, everyone would see living longer as normal, loved ones and family would also live longer with us if no deaths by accident. And more importantly, it’ll all be in good health too because the technology is there to ensure no organ failures, and if there is, we could have regenerative health care where any failing organ just gets regenerated.
33 here. I used to feel like life was rushing by in my teens and early 20s, but the past few years have been the longest of my life. It isnt age that makes life go by fast, its routine. You need more honest engagement with the world around you, and exciting and risky situations, new people to meet, new things to learn. Life feels like it is rushing by because you are bored
Had a very similar experience. I am 30. My mid 20's flew past me
Ok give everyone the money to find those passions…no? Then this is silly advice
@@renlysotherlover294 Following your passions pays more than jobs do. They tell you it doesnt because they want you to work, but look at everyone who makes money and what they do
@@renlysotherlover294 Well, even if you have to work for your passion: Do you do that? Or do you some comfortable routine to get by day by day?
If you prefer comfort over passion, it probably isn't.
@@VampireSquirrel The reality is that many people aren't capable of doing their passions in a sustainable manner. "Look at everyone who makes money and what they do" is taking a very small sample size compared to the size of a nation, or many nations, or the earth. Like, it's a sample size of 10s of thousands, or maybe 100s of thousands vs billions. We are not at that level in our species development either. Who knows if we will ever get to that next level...or what that level even is.
As you get older, each year, month, day is a smaller percentage of your total life. That's why time seems to go faster. And as you get into old age you slow down and everything starts taking longer so you get less done in the time you have. Depressing but true.
Exactly. But in a virtual world it won’t take you longer to do things. And while the percentage thing is true, you may run out of things to do with that much time. I know plenty of elderly people who are already bored of life and just waiting for death. Some people aren’t interested in learning new things. And there’s a chance the human mind can’t even handle remembering that many things so after a time you’ll just reach a max or start forgetting year early life. While I’m sure there will be some people who want to live forever. There’s likely many others who would get bored eventually and want to die.
I disagree. I think it's mostly that as you get older you do less stuff and especially less new stuff which makes it feel like the days are smaller. During Covid I didn't do anything and I felt like I blinked and was two years older. Now I finally got my shit together and for the first time in my life, on my birthday, I was surprised only one year passed, it felt like it was more.
Yep, less unique things happening, routines, grinds, every day is exactly the same...just smears together.
The percentage thing presumes that we live to the standard life expectancy.
Really it’s just that the brain stops noting stimuli that seemingly does not change and so time seems to go by faster. When you’re a kid, everything is new. If you lived a life with plenty of variety, then time does go pretty slowly.
Meditation also really helps, as you aren’t zooming through the day. Buddhist monks remark that time seems to go so slow for them,
I disagree ever since I decided to go back to college time has started to slow down again.
The exponential feeling is true. Think about it when you are 5 years old, a year of your life is literally a fifth of your experience. But at 25 years old, a year is 4% of your experience
Good point!, I've always thought of it like that when you break it down.
I believe because we're so interconnected today, the deluge of information and experiences we have totally accelerates the feeling of time passing. Before cell phones and the internet, life for me was very much living the moment-to-moment experiences, even the mundane ones.
Because we have access to everything, nothing is new for us to process. It all flies by in an instant because of that
@@ron4tron kind of. Even though there's not much information we can't get, you can experience new things in order to slow down time, like learning new skills.
Also, activities that allow the flow state are great for slowing time too, like playing an instrument or playing videogames. If you can successfully match what you're doing with your ability at that task, you'll get that very pleasant sensation of just being in the present.
100%, talked about the same thing elsewhere @@brunosarramide572 👍Though, great point bringing up the flow state, too. I think it's all great to keep in mind, especially when as the OP says, more people find themselves just passing the time, what feels like rapidly. The internet and everything being connected is awesome, but I & many others have probably gotta find better balance to live "longer," and more fulfilled lives.
ABSOLUTELY! To see how everything changes?! It’d be amazing! Only 250 years ago was 1776. We have a really good idea what life was like then. Vastly different! Imagine Ben Franklin living that long.
I don’t know if I’d ever get over the fear of death even in times that I actually want to die or stop existing. But I feel like if we were to become with our human minds as they are, ancient, many of us would find peace just like how many old people do today. you can accept that you could’ve done something better and still have “no regrets“. Because of the acceptance and if humans were to live forever, that wouldn’t necessarily mean everything else would. Someday you might feel like you don’t need one more death of a dog or a cat or some other pet that you’ve been replacingevery short 10 to 15 years
Alex O’Connor is 24???? Holy shiet
This was actually filmed 6 years ago. ;)
Even if I’m also on the side that thinks people will cling less to life after living for a million years, I really appreciate how fast he answered “no” to Alex’s question
I'm 53 and it seems like i was 20 yesterday. I wish we had more time. I don't believe in a after life so for me I'd love to stay as many years as i can.
I hope I can brainwash myself into religion. Which I just don’t feel like it’s possible with my current understanding of the world. Philosophical and scientific theories/evidence fill my head. The god helmet experiment reaffirmed my belief that god is lives in the mind ever since having these existential/ontological ideas shared with me by my hippie uncle when I was a little kid. I cried every night at the thought of everything and everyone including myself just not existing anymore. I almost had a nihilistic attitude towards life ever since my 20s when I was able to cope with… youuu guessed it… the same psychedelic drugs my uncle was high off of. Aha what is life?
@@YourImaginaryFriendDylanyou could look into buddhism
I've never felt Life was precious. And now I am in my 70s. All those decades of my love of playing baseball and softball and other sports has caught up to me. Those old injuries cause daily pain and it only grows as the years pass.
I have no desire to go beyond our limited time.
Yes, but with some caveats :
- I remain in good health the whole time ( not much fun being basically a plant for 900 years)
- My family and friends get to live as long. Otherwise it would be a really boring existence
- My dogs get to live to 100 at least ( ideally they can also get to 1000 )
At 25 I used the analogy of waking up 15 minutes before the alarm was due to go off and languishing luxuriously in the thought of having that extra 15 minutes (or whatever time, from an hour or 2 to 5 minutes) but on rolling over, it seemed, suddenly the alarm was going off. It was over. My point was that I thought life was going to go by like that, luxuriating in my youth but, roll over, doze a bit, and it’s nearly all gone. Now in late middle age I can report back. I was right.
That is so sad. I hope researchers will be able to reverse aging soon.
@@jimj2683 Well I kind of thought it was a universal experience, more or less. Just another way of saying it goes faster than you think it will.
I'm 65 and happily retired. Theoretically, I'd love a 1000 years. Of course, that's a simple outlook as we'd over populate the world, societal norms may change so much I'd feel like an alien on my own world... But again, I'd like to give it a try before refusing any offered life extension.
Just some perspective from an older guy. I remember having the feeling of time passing faster at around 24 and it feels like the pace has not quickened since then at least for me. It was like I was at one cruising speed and then through work I accelerated up to a faster but stable cruising speed. It's kinda nice. Time took way too long as a child imo. Remember waiting as a child? It was excruciating.
Man has chased immortality since time began. The idea of it being possible after death is no doubt comforting for many, but I'm not taking my chances
Immortality doesn't guarantee eternal youthfulness. Imagine being immortal while always looking elderly. Idk I'd rather stick with mortality and YOLO.
@@tylere.8436 Immortality kinda requires you to be youthful otherwise you'd still die of old age.
Lol...what chances? Immortality is decidedly unavailable on Earth, for now 😛
@@EternalModerateNo, you could be immortal, but feeble and ailing the whole time 😂
@bernlin2000 If your ailing and feeble, than things have already mostly worn out, so you're mortality will be high
The ancient Greeks believed that the Gods envied humans for being mortal, because knowing that we have to die makes experiences unique and precious. If you know you still have 990 years to live you don't appreciate time with people you love as much.
I lost my brother at age 26 and that really changed my perception of time and how I want to live my life. The uncertainty makes everything more intense and valuable.
Also I'm thinking of my uncle who recently committed suicide. I don't think he would have wanted another 927 years of heavy depression and severe health problems.
So from my point of view it's never so much about duration and mostly about quality of life.
It doesn't matter how old you are, it is the quality of the life being lived that will be the determining factor if somebody wants more time or not.
I would be willing to bet that if we asked people how okay they feel about dying, we would see a bigger average of acceptance the longer their health/life span has been.
The scary thing is that in virtual reallity you don't have the option of killing yourself. What if a bug or maybe even deliberate programing of some evil person outside caused your virtual reallity become like hell... Than you'll be trapped in that hell for what seems to you as a 1000 years!
Brutal. Will most likely happen to me if it happens to anyone at all 🤭
what scares me the most out of this kind of concept is its use for punishment. Imagine being able to sentence someone to 10000 years in a virtual jail in just one year of real life. It would drive anyone crazy
@@brunosarramide572 The idea was already used in some SciFi book / movies / series. In some they came out as psychological toast, in others their mind was frozen as well, and they simply woke up to a world where everyone they cared about was dead since centuries.
@@brunosarramide572i think it depends. You manage to prove to your brain that you are dead, you'll die. But surely a system that can generate such a complex VR to trick your brain will have some safe mesures to ensure the death is not that real.
Being alive forever is bad: atheist Also atheists: we need to become immortal and make death optional
83 yrs old and still at least 4 or 5 lifetimes worth of things not even yet started, so without reincarnation it looks like I am pretty much screwed. Best I can do now is just keep on plugging.
“Each of them wishes they could live a thousand years long! Yet to be granted such a long life shall not spare them from the punishment. God is Seeing of everything they do.” ~ The Qur’an, Sūrah 2:96
The thing missing from this proposition is quality of life.
The speakers likely have fairly high qualities of life.
However if you change the proposition to somebody who has had a very tragic life, who has seen a lot of hardship atrocity and/ or heartbreak- And the willingness to have an extended life very much likely changes. There are a lot of people who have the exact opposite attitude here; they just want life to be over already.
Because they have had to deal with these sorts of things, or because they have highly nihilistic outlooks.
If you've never had a truly wary heart it is easy to say that you would want to live forever.
For myself much of what drives me to keep living is curiosity of the natural world. It is learning about and experiencing that natural world. Part of me likes having the idea of a hyperbolic chamber Dragon Ball Z style for your mind that you could use to grow and study, The other part of me asks what would be the point without being able to go out into nature to have a genuine experience of the real world. The idea that my mind would be stuck for thousands of years inside of a computer even one simulating the natural world, without the ability to leave on my own back into a body that is functional with a high quality of life would be absolutely horrifying.
This is great for helping me go back to sleep. Thanks. Boring stuff can be useful.
We tend to miss out on a lot in this short life that we take for granted truly how much time we do have. Actually, we have a lot of time. It won't matter if we lived a thousand or a million, if we are unsatisfied, it's not that the years were short but that we didn't take the time to focus on the things that pass us by.
This is to all, don't be shy, go out, party, have sex, start a business, spend time with loved ones
Yes. The imperative for any rational sentient being is to keep going. If you are worried about being bored, then you always have that option within those thousands of years.
It's important to understand that the actual contrast in the argument is between finite and infinite lifetimes. Then you have to consider the qualitative aspects of each.
I think the story of Numenor and its downfall is a really interesting and relevant exploration of this kind of thing, although I suppose those people also lived in a world where there were people who lived forever as opposed to just wishing it were possible. Either way, I always thought the Numenorians had the best deal in living for 200-odd years but if it's normalised, maybe yeah you would just want more
the longer you live the quicker it goes
1/x
True, though I can't help think there must be a limiting factor to this. Not necessarily within an average Western human lifetime
@@Stopfief Iirc, with more new experiences, your brain has more to process. With more to process, you feel like things are “longer,” and that you have more time.
It’s why an hour for children can be so agonisingly slow, but for adults, fly by in an instant. The truth is, the secret to a long life would be constantly experiencing new things.
You can counter it by living intensly and varied experiences. It's the routine that accelerates it, not age.
I remember a statistic saying that the accel of time actually slows down at very old age.
It's so hilarious how this happens to virtually everyone at the age of 24. They all go 'I'm almost to quarter CENTURY!' 😂
This happened to me when I turned 10😂
I was like "There's 2 stages of life: single digits, and double digits, I'm now in the second and final stage of life" or something to that effect, so I basically had a mid-life crisis.
Which in hindsight is some wild philosophy for a 10 year old hahaha
This is such an academic question...
OK, not yet for a 24-year old and one in the thirties or 40s, who are still mentally fit.
But we deteriorate, it is unavoidable. Our bodies deteriorate, get all kinds of wear and tear issues.
And our brain starts to deteriorate.
I saw my father with more than 90 slowly wasting away, having been the active one in our family.
More and more forgetting things, starting to forget words, he wanted to tell you something, but could not express it anymore.
His memory becoming more and more garbled up, in the end not knowing anymore where he really was, what his situation was.
When people are more coherent when they talk in their sleep, when memories of the past are coming up, when you understand "Oh, now he is in the office, discussing some issue with his colleagues".
That made me come to the conclusion that no, I do NOT want to live forever.
Not that I would not want to experience how the world develops more, because I am largely positive in my base approach to life, but that final phase is horrible, unworthy, hopeless,
Been watching Alex for a couple years now and am shocked he’s only 24. Such a bright mind
I don’t care what anyone says about the drawbacks I’d love to live to 1000 if my health would stay decent. Just being able to be an observer to all the changes would be worth it to me
24. Damn. And I've been watching him for several years, too.
You're missing something, the will to live.
A friend of the family died last year, he was 87. We talked quite often about life etc. He told me about a conversation he had with his older sister, she was 89 at the time.
He told her he was tired of life, he was content with the things he'd done, his work life, his family, raising his kids, but at 87 he'd had enough. He wouldn't do anything that might be considered suicidal, but he would be content if he simply went to sleep and never woke up.
She told him she'd felt that way for about 5 years.
I'm not saying everyone is the same, but if the human mind can get tired of living in 85 years, what kind of living torment would living 150, 200 or god forbid 1,000 years become?
I know there's an old joke that says: who wants to live 'til they're 90? The answer: an 89 year old.
But I'm not convinced old people want to extend life as much as that joke suggests.
I think it was Ricky Gervais who observed: they say stopping smoking will add 10 years to your life. But it adds 10 years at the end of your life, that's not the extra 10 years we want!
We want the extra 10 years in our 20s or 30s when we are young and active enough to benefit from them. We don't want an extra 10 years to start at 80, when we're confined to a wheelchair watching repeats of TV programs we watched when we were 20.
Obviously, if you're old and can't do anything, you wouldn't want to live much longer. When people talk about being inmortal or living 1000 years, they mean living that long being always young, that changes everything.
If I'm young and I don't want to die now, why would I want to die in 100 years if I'm still the same?
Dude, I’m 39 and I’m already exhausted 😂
alex is only a year older than me and i've been watching him for over three years at this point and it still boggles my mind how someone just a year my senior sounds like he could be my professor. his intelligence is inspiring truly
2000?
@@GameMasterProducts yes, i was born in the year 2000
@@zanelemini9521 I see
Experiencing 1000 of years in virtual reality only to be pulled out into the real world. Finding out that everything you did, all the things you had accomplished, the love you found, was all a fabrication. I don’t think I would be clinging to life either.
Wow I didn't realize Alex where so young. And he started long time ago. Very intelligent person.
There will always be more to have, to want, to strive for. It’s better to reach for goals and then redirect when they’ve either been reached or become out of reach.
@santanoschsantosch3016 keep thy religion to thyself and life will work out great
If you want to live longer, you might want to go back to a plant-based diet Alex 😉. See Dr. Michael Gregor’s books: „How not to die“, „How not to age“ etc. The only way we‘re going to live longer is if we start taking care of our health, and avoid the illnesses caused by animal consumption.
I have a feeling time will be like money. Some dysfunctional greedy people will want an endless amount. Others will be content and done at 100, maybe 200 at the most.
I don’t think I could handle dealing with the amount of sh!tty people we have for 200+ years.
I want to experience a lot, then be done. 150-200 max, then I’m ready for what ever comes next.
Heaven or a slipping off into the void. I could use the rest.
The psychology we evolved with considered us living 60 years. To live to a 1000 will change us.
You are wise beyond your years
Life clinging is a “klesa” afluctiin of the mind in advaita vedanta. I agree
Very respectful debate, love to see it
The main reason I think you’d want to live forever would be to see how things end up. All of us only get to experience a brief flashpoint in history. It’s like only being able to read a single sentence in a ten thousand page book. There’s so many unanswered questions that we’ll never know the answers to. Like, will we ever discover life beyond earth? Where will evolution take our species? What happened before the Big Bang? The real curse of mortality is how much is left unanswered when we go.
I think we just forget how long we've lived. When we remember certain event a year ago, we already forgot everything that was in between, so it does feels like yesterday. People with dementia literally feel like and are convinced that a day haven't passed since they got sick. I feel like playing along with this forgetfulness is a waste. Let a person relive every second of their life and they would be more than happy to end it. It would be overwhelmingly enough.
But our brain is programmed so we just can't get overwhelm. No matter how fun or exiting the thing is in absolute, if you do it enough you'll get bored. Even if your day concisted of 1000 different exiting activities the brain would still get used and get bored and forgot most of it eventualy.
This is my nightmare tbh-because the mind ages. It is not built for those thousands of years of knowledge and strain. We would not be ourselves if we ever came out of that reality. Thats kind of why people use pass on immortality-it's not just the death of your loved ones, but that nothing will tether you to the identity you once called your own.
Alex always seems to remind me that there a nice young brilliant thinkers out there and there may actually be hope for humanity after all. We’ll see I guess.
I think the best thing would be us reaching a point where death becomes something we opt in to and rarely happens with out us opting into it
I think it's less about the duration of life and more about the quality of life. If you're living in abject misery, with knowledge that there's no room for improvement later on, then there's not a lot of reason to desire to keep on living. You're out of options, and all you cab do is suffer.
But if you are living and having pleasant experiences and there are things to strive towards in your future, you've got reasons to keep on going.
As long as you have aspirations to do things, you'll want to keep living. The question is, how long can we play this game of identifying new things to aspire to achieve? Across eternity, you'll eventually do everything you can think to do. What's the point of winning the Nobel peace prize if you've done it a quintillion times before? Once you get bored of the game of life due to lack of novelty, that's when you're in a pickle, because you'd still have an eternity left to go if you live forever.
According to Yuval Harari, the point is not whether we want immortality. We'll reach it anyway because there's no net difference between perfectioning the cure of diseases and bettering human nature as a whole
Ideally, i want to live in roughly perfect health
for as long as i feel like living.
I am sure I'd want that 1000 years.
That is really not a very long time.
70/80 year lifespan, where the last 10+ years
rob of us health, function, and dignity is a cruel joke.
I might maybe want more as i approached 10,000.
But it would always be more important that I'd be allowed to opt-out if/whenever I ever decided to.
Life is nothing but a couple hundred memorable moments. I have no clue what occurred every single day during the year that I was 7, you probably don’t either. Maybe 1 or 2 memories from that year. The rest may as well not have happened
From *An Anarcho-Transhumanist FAQ:*
"Life-extension is certainly not the entirety of transhumanism, but it is an important example of a struggle that we've opened and shockingly largely fight alone. The notion that an objectively "good life" extends to seventy or a hundred years but no further is clearly arbitrary, and yet such an opinion is both nearly universally held and violently defended. Many early transhumanists were shocked by the bizarreness and brazenness of this response, but it illustrates how people will become staunch proponents of existing injustices for fear of otherwise having to reconsider standing assumptions in their own lives. In the same way that people will defend mandatory military service or murdering animals for food, the arguments for death are clearly defensive rationalizations:
*"Death gives life its meaning."*
How is death at 70-years-old more meaningful than death at 5-years-old or at 200-years-old? If an eighty-year-old woman gets to live and work on her poetry for another five decades, does that really undermine your capacity to find meaning so badly that you'd have her murdered?
*"We would get bored."*
So let's build a world that isn't boring! Never mind the wild possibilities embedded in both anarchism and transhumanism, it would take almost three hundred thousand years to read every book in existence today. There's already 100 million recorded songs in the world. Thousands of languages with their own ecosystems of conceptual associations and poetry. Hundreds of fields to study on rich and fascinating subjects. Vast arrays of experiences and novel relationships to try. Surely we can do with a few more centuries at least.
*"Old static perspectives would clog up the world."*
It's a pretty absurd and horrifying to instinctively appeal to genocide as the best means to solve the problem of people not being plastic in their perspectives or identities. Over a hundred billion humans have died since the dawn of homo sapiens. At best they were only able to convey the tiniest sliver of their subjective experiences, their insights and dreams, before everything else inside them was abruptly snuffed out. People say that every time an elder dies it's like a library being burned to the ground. Well we've lost literally a 100 billion libraries over the course of homo sapiens. There are no doubt infinite myriad ways we might live and change, but it would be strange indeed if the sharp binary of sudden, massive and irreversible loss that is currently standard was universally ideal.
This is an illustrative example in that it gets to the heart of what transhumanism offers as an extension of anarchism's radicalism: the capacity to demand unexamined norms or conventions justify themselves, to challenge things otherwise accepted. "
I want a longer life not because I'm afraid of death but because I love life
I can guarantee you no matter how long I live, I’ll always want more so long as I’m sane and mobile.
I don’t want 1000 years. I want more.
Enough so it will never disappear.
What is Man’s aim in life? To Glorify God and enjoy him forever.
I've no way of proving this, but I've long suspected through the perspective of our aging years we are able to perceive spacetime relativity, of at a small scale. A new born experiences their first day, their second day doubles their experience, and halves the perception they had of a day. And so later in life, you see pictures of old celebrities when they were young and they look younger, often because you are older now than they were then, but you remember them being old. And this somehow applies even as they are getting older - you are catching up to them proportionally in time. Not sure if I've described that adequately, but maybe it's clear for some. As we age, everything appears younger because our relative perspective on time has accelerated. Or something like that. I'm not sure how to phrase it.
I don't know if there is a literal physical component to it, but I think the subjective experience of time is very much tied to this.
The beard and mustache looks so much better than what you have rn, no offense
My 21st birthday I fell asleep in the snow in my backyard (Mich, Feb) and it felt GREAT. But my friends and family brought me in. I could see one freezing, but not THREE.
Nah, I am secretly relieved I will be long dead and forgotten in a 100. I mean, life is ok (I'm not complaining, as I've been lucky in many ways - and I plan to live my life to the natural end of it), but there still is a lot of suffering, and living longer doesn't really fix that.
Sounds like you need to improve the quality of your life, not decrease the length of it.
Star Trek episode on that. 😊
I'd like the option to live forever as long as I can dip out when I choose. All this "immortality is torture, you'll see everyone you live die" stuff isn't putting me off tbh
If i could live for another 200 years whilst having good health, experience no illnesses etc i feel i would say no. I am here at this point in time and will deal with what i am fortunate to have, what is to come and reap what i have sown. I have never understood people saying they would want to live forever. I think a million years from now whatever civilization roams planet earth will highly likely be as different from us as we are to bacteria.
I’d want to watch humanity from afar and in a non-physical form. But I would absolutely not want to live on this planet for 1000 yrs. Fuck that.
Why? Think you'd get bored of it?
@@EternalModerate Yeah. I don't know if you have seen how people who live over 100 talk but they just want to die because its too long.
Guess you never found your "someone"? I would live with my partner forever, we never stop enjoying each other's minds. When you find that deep connection, it truly is "forever"...and you never want to lose that, in any length of time.
@@bernlin2000 What a wonderful thought. What an ideal existence.
But reality is NOT ideal. The universe is constantly changing, and we are constantly changing.
Our bodies deteriorate, it is unavoidable. Medicine cannot replace all of your body parts.
And at some point your brain deteriorates as well.
Unimaginable when you are young, I know.
But go to a nursing home, and have a look. Talk to the people, how much is left of their mind.
Don't worry, my saying is "Even when it is an unpleasant one, at least it is a distraction" from the monotony.
@@bernlin2000 reckon you'd get bored of each other after a 100 years or so
Foregt thousand years, i cant even live a single day without thinking about ending it all.
When you were five years old, the next Christmas was 1/5th of your whole life into the future. However, when you are sixty, it's only 1/60th. Hence, when you are older, time seems to go faster.
Alex is so impressed with himself it's embarrassing. It's amazing how far received pronunciation can take you 😂
We are only 80 or at most 100 yr in this world. Creation was not finished on the 6th day but it will be finished when the new Jerusalem comes down from Heaven and, this world is destroyed. Then God create a New Heaven and a new earth with no distance between Heaven and earth. For God 1000Yr are just as 1 day. 80Yr for God is like 10 min. This world is a test. After this it is eternal with no more dead or pain but joy and Glory forever. If you have a wedding party you don't want a hateful neighbours on your party. So does God want Friends and not haters, they will be outside for ever with the Devil.
Aleeex. Bring back the beard 😎❤️
Personally, I wouldnt mind living forever, so long as I always had the option to end it. If cybernetic enhancements ever become a thing, you can bet I'll be the first in line
Fuck Alex is 24. I'm 26. I really have to get used to the fact that most online personalities and pro athletes are younger then me now. Shit getting older is a strange experience.
I want the choice to live forever.
Also, if I am not allowed to bring more people into this world, that is also a choice I am willing to give up, given ONLY that people will generally be able to decide when to die rather than having that levied upon them
I'm currently on a mission to live forever.
So far so good.
The first goal is to become the oldest person in the world. Yesterday I set a personal best and I'm looking good for outliving the current title holder.
I know this is just a clip but what’s the purpose of this conversation? Is it discourse on the benefits or ills of living a long time? Or saying that the end is inevitable so what’s the point?
Anybody who says they feel as if time is moving faster each year, try and spend 20 hours a day looking at a wall. Guarantee you whittle down those 1000 years to a few weeks real fast.
Looking at how the world is turning out......I wish I was never born. Rather than living longer.
Alex, are you guessing that perhaps humans may grow weary of existence? In lieu of debilitating disease, when has this ever been the case? Where is this conjecture coming from?
Except that exponential rate of the years feeling faster and faster is due to lack of activity and complacence.
Well that's sorted that out. We're all dying. I'm 67😮😢😢
What about transferring consciousness to VR that could potentially be a man made heaven. We would also need to escape the earth before it's end and eventually escape the universe before its heat death or fix the limitations of the universe to create a recycling effect for our heaven to be eternal. We should also create a way to acquire the consciousness of our ancestors to bring them into our heaven. Blowing my mind.😮
If this sort of "thousands of years of experience in few seconds" situation came true, I have a feeling we would effectively experience everything that there is to experience within all the possible configurations of atoms in the Universe (especially if this VR allowed you to manipulate that reality without physical constraints) relatively quickly and then what? To a lot of people their life is defined by their children and no offense, that is largely just biological desire to procreate and leave some part of your genes around. With that gone, I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't want to stick around for effectively billions of years.
Maybe this is why we don't see advanced civilizations, it's probably easier to reach technological level that allows you to hook your brain into some virtual reality than it is to effectively traverse the Universe so that's just what they all end up doing and either just live in there effectively forever or, yes, just end up killing themselves eventually as there's no point to linger on with nothing else to do and your "memory bank" full of all the possible experiences that there can possibly be.. Rather nihilistic, yes, but that makes sense to me.
If one believes in reincarnation (am personally unsure) or even the Christian notion of an eternal life after death, then wanting to live to be 1,000 isn’t an issue, it’s a given.
I see he's going for a bit of a Peter Sutcliffe look now. Interesting choice.
I think the difference for the real world, is that we age, both physically and mentally; to the point that for actual people who lived close to or past the age of 100 years old, their minds, memory, and ability to communicate begin to fail, if not completely
So, if it were possible to live 1000 years under the same normal aging conditions it would be nothing but suffering a long torture
As of right now, I'm 17, and I want to be immortal. This could change but I seriously doubt it.
Years flying by isnt a cliché, older people experience things faster than younger people as they age.
It would seem silly to throw it all away given the chance to live longer. Sure, if youre suffering horribly, it would make sense to end it all, but other than that...
I'd love to start with a thousand and go from there. Sign me up please!
Not convinced that there's no limit to how long most of us would choose to live.
I get what he’s saying but I don’t think either of them take into account what exactly you’d do with all that time. Most people who have given it any amount of thought know that immortality would be a horrible curse. However, death also doesn’t seem to be a good alternative because of two reasons: fear of the unknown and fear of missing out. Immortality fixes the latter because if you live forever, there’s a 100% chance you’ll do everything there is to do. When you accomplish that, the only thing left to do is die which you will eventually desire if for no other reason than to do something new.
I don’t think you can really do everything there is to do. Especially if you’re creative.
@@LordJagd it’s not a question of creativity. infinite time guarantees you will do everything there is to do at some point.
@@bkwilcox23 Infinite time, sure. I meant more about living for 1,000 or 10,000 years. Infinite lifespans is such an abstraction that it's difficult to talk about in the same terms, and I think being immortal in such a way would probably necessitate changing oneself and one's consciousness so much that these matters of purpose doing things become null.
It doesnt matter how old you can get. If you lived for a billion years you would still say 'it felt like yesterday when i bought my first beer'.
Yes, I'm very scared of dying.
I'd accept a thousand years, but it depends on quality of life.