
The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality - lermontov
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/art-not-dying
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rgovostes
My small town in Japan was heavily influenced by a scholar who was searching
for this elixir for Qin Shihuang. There's a park dedicated to the scholar,
Jofuku:

[https://www.shinguu.jp/en/spots/detail/A0005](https://www.shinguu.jp/en/spots/detail/A0005)

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jkabrg
Being mummified was a clever move. If his brain were preserved long enough,
then he may hypothetically have been brought back to life. A bit like
cryogenics.

~~~
jacquesm
I'd give it roughly the same chance that I give the heads sitting in cryogenic
storage being brought back to life: 0.

~~~
1996
No need to bring the brain back to life. When memories and the connectome are
finally understood, simply scan the brain, even by destroying the original if
needed: cut it into slices, scan it, then upload it to a robotic body, or even
a simple computer simulation (good enough for me!)

I do not want to be "flesh and bones" when we will have better alternatives.

I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark
matter. Do you see the absurdity of what we are? I can’t even express these
things properly, because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid,
limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other
than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing
over me.

~~~
komali2
This doesn't the answer the "how does cloned consciousness work" question.

For re-vitilization, I don't give a fuck if it's a perfect copy of me walking
around. I want it to be _me_ , the current stream of consciousness. To the
abyss I say, no thank you.

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robotresearcher
Better not go to sleep then. You woke up from the abyss this morning.

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speakeron
> You woke up from the abyss this morning.

Actually I woke up directly (and, apparently, seamlessly) from a dream. (I
went lucid a little too carelessly surged to a waking in the same manner as
you come up from the bottom of a swimming pool).

To be fair, though, I did wake up into the dream from the abyss. But since the
abyss is timelessness, how would we know the difference?

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germainemalcolm
Was I the only person hoping this article would go into the daoist concept of
immortality and its meeting with modern day sciences understanding of
physiology?

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sgt101
Possibly! But I'm curious as to these connections - could you expand?

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selestify
Yes please, seconded!

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mirimir
For a different perspective, I recommend _The Western Lands_ by William S.
Burroughs.

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speedplane
No one wants to die. However it seems that it’s mostly powerful people truly
believe it’s possible to escape death. Lawrence of Arabia, Walt Disney, and
Peter Thiel come to mind as examples. Clearly there’s something about amassing
a large amount of power in life that lends itself to believing you can
overcome death.

~~~
ddorian43
Maybe they've seen in life that if you try you can maybe achieve stuff ? And
when you have billion you don't lose anything by spending some of it in high-
risk/high-reward projects.

~~~
speedplane
Obviously if they're powerful, they think they can accomplish anything.

But maybe they've witnessed history. Every king, industrialist, or self-
absorbed person has tried exactly the same thing, living forever. I have no
problem when any rich person tries to do this, it's just frustrating when they
claim that this desire is unique, when "not wanting to die" is probably the
most basic desire of just about everyone, and has been through the ages rich
and poor.

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buth_lika
To me fear of death is a sign of not really having been born yet. If you can't
make 50 years worthwhile, you can't make 50000 years worthwhile, and if you
can't cope with being limited to 80 years or so, you will not be able to cope
with the heat death of the universe. It also stands to reason that if you feel
it's impossible to give up 100 years of grown personality and memories, it
will be even harder and more painful to give up orders of magnitude more of
that. It seems like power in that those who want it the most deserve it the
least because they are the worst at using it.

On a very basic level, if I feel myself to be entitled to live forever, then I
couldn't rightfully deny that to anyone else. So at some point this would mean
less new births. If it didn't, it would mean an even more crass explosion of
the human footprint, an even more extreme choking out of other lifeforms --
and it could very well mean both. But that would suck, since being healthy and
alive isn't just great because I can see 5000 million particles rendered in 3
lines of CSS, or watch the clouds go by, it's also because of the flora and
fauna, and because of other people. Beings that surprise me, that come into
the world and "become". Knowing there will be future question marks born is
something way more sublime for me than "attack ships on fire" or having this
one video that got 7234 million views.

Life isn't just me, it's also a river in which I am a drop. If I want to not
be a drop, so I can keep seeing the river, well... if everybody does that,
there is no more river, and if I want to reserve immortality for just myself,
I am an asshole. I don't mean to brag, but I figured that out as a kid, and no
immortality advocate I read or heard or saw so far managed to put a meaningful
dent in it.

Yes, I am for medicine, I think it's great when people can live longer and
stay healthy longer (even though we then ignore their wisdom when it's
inconvenient, e.g. [0]), but no, I cannot draw you an exact line, except that
I know "immortality" as extreme and as espoused by technophiles or emperors or
preachers does not interest me, at all. If anything I'm curious about the
biographies of the people looking for it; they point at some clouds that may
or may not have a moon behind it, but I can't help but look from the finger to
their arm to their shoulders to their head. I feel that's where the majority
if not all of the action is.

Last, but not least: even if you managed to completely overcome all aging and
disease, assuming no asteroids and other surprises: the only way to _ensure_
you will live "forever" is to severely restrict the agency of anyone else but
you. Other humans acting would be a potential threat, in infinite time it
would become an infinite threat, while at the same time you have an infinite
lifetime to lose. Nothing might be too crazy and machavellian, and like
junkies people might just keep going down the spiral long after they lost all
joy in it.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17721280)
<\-- 99 years...

~~~
Engineering-MD
Personally, I think the optimal aim is agelessness. There are issues with
immortality, as there is with any unlimited concept. I think what most people
fear is a fixed time limit. I want to be the master of my own destiny, and not
have biology telling me when to go. if we become ageless, people still die
from trauma and suicide, but we lose that pressure of knowing we have such a
limited time. That might be good for altruism, long term outlooks, and delayed
rewards. Plus it addresses another major issue: the slow decline into frailty.

I think by becoming ageless we can gain many advantages of immortality and
avoid many of the problems.

~~~
buth_lika
All these issues can also be overcome with a "live and let live" attitude, and
expanding ones empathy beyond oneself, and tentatively even beyond the
present. At least to me, the main difference between me living for 1000 years,
and me and 9 other people living 100 years each, is that 10 people would
probably be more interesting, even though I would only get to see a tenth of
it.

Like that Roman dude said, the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to
be filled, so it seems with life. To have or to be... if only I could live
1000 years, if only 10000, if only 100000... is it so absurd to at least
consider it possible that we would treat it just like we treat RAM and CPU
now?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

Sure, it's apples and oranges in a way, but satisfaction really is something
that happens in the mind and not just the external circumstances, so I don't
see why we wouldn't be able to consider any amount of time "not long enough"
at some point. Doesn't mean we would, but if we did, we would have gained
nothing, other than less diversity of persons.

> _We feel free to express ourselves because we are ready to fade into
> emptiness. When we are trying to be active and special and to accomplish
> something, we cannot express ourselves... So we have enjoyment, we are
> free._

\-- Shunryu Suzuki

> _Of short duration are those who praise as well as those who are praised,
> those who remember and those who are remembered. And even that happens just
> in one corner of the world, and even there not everybody agrees with one
> another, a single person doesn 't even agree with themselves. This whole
> Earth however is but a dot._

\-- Marcus Aurelius

This does not change meaningfully, to me, if you replace Earth with Universe
and short duration with 10^10000 years. It's the same basic problem, and even
I am constantly in flux, not ever the exact same person I was an instant ago.
So why not get over that? For me letting go of some things doesn't mean giving
anything up, it's more like having the hands free to receive better things; I
like the tiny actual place I have in reality more than an imaginary big one
that requires all sorts of ballast and images, layers of abstraction and
alienation.

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bgongfu
The whole discussion is a side track, the essence of who we are is and always
was immortal. Do you honestly believe in a universe that would throw away the
results of the experiment?

There's no proof either way, but it seems the least likely alternative to me.
As to Buddha, Gandhi, Tesla, Einstein and many more otherwise respectable
thinkers.

Examine what you're not supposed to think, what is collectively ridiculed;
that's where truth is hiding in plain sight.

~~~
visarga
> Do you honestly believe in a universe that would throw away the results of
> the experiment?

It does not. 'Results' are the survival of our genes. That's how we came to be
here. Also, survival of our ideas, in culture and technology.

