Yesterday, Jason Silva (half of the Max and Jason duo) sent me a link to a solo project, a short video, The Immortalists.
I love the ideas posited in this work. I'm as life-and-death-obsessed as any other girl who started reading Albert Camus before the age of reason, thanks to a childhood that unfolded prior to the "age appropriateness" meme. I well remember standing before my parents and their friends, laughing during a dinner party, with my tiny fists balled up on my hips after they disturbed my insomniac dream-scape with their mirth.
"Why are you laughing?" I demanded. "You're all going to die one day."
Death is a part of life, the very existence of which divides endless eternity into manageable cross-sections that together create a ceaseless process of transformation.
But does it have to be?
The Future, Without the Futurists
Just today, I caught this tweet from Jamais Cascio:
Perhaps the future we envision will take place without us, or maybe Jason Silva is right when he says he's convinced that new awareness can be engineered and death beaten. But what does "beaten" mean in this case? There's no way our tiny blue planet can support immortality for the bodies we have now, much less the new ones that would continue to get born. Inevitably, such a crisis of resources would lead to some catastrophic, thinning-the-herd projects, the likes of which we have already seen many times in human history. The implications of this are vast. Not everyone can be immortal in physical form, even with a miraculous technological solution.
Virtual Immortality
It is far more likely that if we ever manage to approach a deathless state, it will be virtual, and maybe even evolve to where the embodiment of a physical self no longer seems relevant. Even if we are able to move the flow of consciousness into a different format, however, we would never be immune to hazard. The machines that sustain this form of immortality would still exist in a physical environment, rendering them susceptible to damage or extinction.
The Last Mortal Generation?
I perceive life and death in a game-like way. Reality can be hacked, and I've no doubt that many of the people I know well who are working on artificial intelligence, machine sentience and the quest for immortality will make exponential strides in coming years, but will it happen fast enough for some form of extended consciousness to be achieved in my lifetime? As far as you've come can't be undone.
I hope that immortality in any form is not achieved before humans are capable of the kind of existence that would make an individual life or a society worth perpetuating for all eternity--or at least as close as we can get before hazard strikes, or gets averted. The way we've let the world fall apart economically and socially demonstrates that perhaps it's for the best to allow new thoughts and fresh perspectives to permeate the global culture and economy.
Or are we finally getting there?
What do you think?
2 comments:
This resonates strongly with me. I've read perhaps far too much Kurzweil, but nevertheless it does sound convincing that at some point machine intelligences will emerge - and they will be us.
For some years I have pondered the same unfortunate scenario: we may be the last or near the last generation of mortal intelligences. Of the tens of billions of people that have lived and died through eternity to this age of wonders, what fate could it be that leaves us as the last few who missed the bus heading to infinity? A tragedy deep and frightening.
Until then, I write in the vain hope of living beyond through cold and wispy memes.
Thank you so much for this post.
I think the prospect of eternal life in any form is terrifying. We are creatures of an eternal cycle, perhaps, using, developing, and recycling our component parts, our ideas etc. Growth is great. But there must be a time to rest, to get out of the way of the new.
Larkin's The Tress has it right, I think:
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
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