I feel that you're strawmanning the original post by changing it from something like "death is necessary" to "death is good". Clearly there's a difference between a body becoming frail vs. somebody intentionally fatally injuring it. There's also a difference between stopping disease and stopping aging (well, at least if you define aging as not a disease, which I think is fair since AFAIK it has a different mechanism than disease.)
> there are plenty of kinds of change that don't involve ending a person's life without their consent
Is "without consent" another reference to murder, or just the fact that most people don't want to die? I assume the latter. How do you know that the kinds of change that do happen, aren't mostly because death as we know it exists and subtly influences all our decisions? Maybe there really would be less change without death.
This is an interestingly twisted line of thinking. RE aging vs. disease, how the two are different? Aging looks exactly like a genetic disorder that slowly kills you, the only difference being that this is the single disease we all share.
As for "death is good" vs. "death is necessary", I disagree and it looks to me that "necessary" comes out of trying to come to terms with the fact it's inevitable. You could argue in the past in the same way that diseases are necessary for various reasons, and yet we decided to cure them instead, invented antibiotics and hygiene and other medicine.
> Clearly there's a difference between a body becoming frail vs. somebody intentionally fatally injuring it.
Comparing to murder may not be the best. Try comparing to accidents. Both dying of old age and of an accident is unintentional. Yet as a society we accept the former while rejecting the latter. This is strange and IMO happens only because we know we can prevent accidents, but we don't know how to prevent aging. Yet.
We'd already know if more people cared instead of delegating the problem to deities or thinking it's Good to die because it's the Natural Order of Things.
We'd already know if more people cared instead of delegating the problem to deities or thinking it's Good to die because it's the Natural Order of Things.
And it's socially acceptable for people to choose that. People ought to be allowed to delegate the problem to deities, and they ought to be allowed believe in a myth for death, and allowed to believe it's part of the natural order of things.
I'm not advocating banning religion here, I'm only expressing my wish more people cared about solving death - especially those who just give up and accept it as "natural order". But still, this is just a social attitude that people acquire as they grow up, and with contemporary science and technology we should revisit that attitude, since we're finally capable of making concrete progress towards life extension.
Until we can easily send billions (at least) to other worlds, be it in Solar system or further away, death is +- necessary, like it or not.
This planet can feed many more people than it does now, without famines. But there is a limit, and looking how most people just don't care about these things as long as they get their paycheck and can watch their favorite TV show, let's be realistic.
Honestly, I don't see what's all the fuss with death - I am atheist/agnostic, so no hope for some eternal afterlife (but happy to be proven wrong :)). But in no way I find it disturbing or worrying, just human business as usual (there have been roughly 120 billions of human deaths already, and I am not special anyhow). It's actually quite nice to be perfectly OK with death internally, it brings peace with oneself and the world on more than one level.
I suppose I mean "necessary" more as "necessary to the way life works right now." Existence with immortality or very-long life expectancy could be completely different in ways we can't fathom, so I'm opposed to the idea of automatically accepting it as more desirable than what we have now. (Yes, this is a conservative and somewhat closed-minded position. If nothing else I hope people will come up with a detailed vision of what conquering mortality would look like, rather than just assuming it will be better.)
On the disease comparison, admittedly I was only thinking of viral and bacterial disease. Death is much like a genetic disorder we all have. On the other hand, isn't "health" usually defined as how a "normal" person's body works? If death is normal, then it can't be a disease. OK, enough semantic games. ;) I still see a qualitative difference between keeping a body healthy enough that it doesn't die until that universal process wears it down vs. something earlier.
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that society accepts death and rejects accidents. Is the grief of accidental death really universally distinguishable from that of old age or illness? On both sides, you'll have anger/sadness it happened so soon, or reluctant acknowledgement that it was going to happen some day and we can't predict it or prepare.
(The following is somewhat OT in the context of "uploading the brain":) On grievous injury, I don't know if commenters have been including vastly improved ability to recover from those in "immortality." I wonder though, if fatal injury were the only way to die, would it cause people to lock themselves away in a bubble to live forever, rather than risk dying? Maybe in the first stages of the science, the body will still get frailer as the years pass, so that sudden accidental death becomes more likely the longer you live. Would such an eternal sheltered existence, lived in constant fear of losing it one day, be worth having? If not, why do you want it? If so, why is it really that different than what you already have? After 1,000 years are you going to say "I've accomplished enough, experienced enough, that I am now more comfortable with possibly dying than I was when I was 25."?
Presumably the likelihood and number of possible accident scenarios will decrease over time, so maybe most people won't worry too much. Murder could still be a big fear/threat though.
I can understand that conservative view, and while I personally feel that "not dying" is obviously better than dying, one can't deny that a lot of systems that underpin our civilization depend, implicitly or explicitly, on the fact that people generally don't live longer than 100 years. Therefore just suddenly making people not age (or age much slower) would likely cause a very bad disruption and possibly lots of suffering. This topic needs to be discussed and "detailed vision of what conquering mortality would look like" needs to be specified, but personally I don't think those issues are a showstopper, or something that should discourage us from fighting death.
> I'm not sure I agree with the idea that society accepts death and rejects accidents. Is the grief of accidental death really universally distinguishable from that of old age or illness? On both sides, you'll have anger/sadness it happened so soon, or reluctant acknowledgement that it was going to happen some day and we can't predict it or prepare.
The difference is that an accident is treated as an unnecessary death. After it happens, changes are introduced to improve safety and to make sure such accident doesn't happen again. Yet in case of aging, we're just accepting death and moving forward, and only few of us ask how we could make so that such deaths don't happen anymore.
As for your last paragraps - I don't think that longer lifespans will necessarily make people more risk-averse than they're already are. Why would someone choose a sheltered life having 1000 years in front of him and not choose such life having perspective for only 50 more years? I would expect people to start caring about (what we now call) long-term effects of decisions because the consequences would come within the lifetime of the decision maker.
> there are plenty of kinds of change that don't involve ending a person's life without their consent
Is "without consent" another reference to murder, or just the fact that most people don't want to die? I assume the latter. How do you know that the kinds of change that do happen, aren't mostly because death as we know it exists and subtly influences all our decisions? Maybe there really would be less change without death.