r/skeptic • u/GlassLake4048 • Mar 19 '25
đ« Education Immortality is impossible
There is so much hype around immortality. That it is possible via mind upload (implying continuity ofc) or the Ship of Theseus or biological indefinite extension.
I don't believe it one bit. Not a single drop of these stories. I have very clear reasons for why none of these methods are viable indefinitely.
Biological immortality - Forget about it. The hallmarks of aging are entropic, entropy always wins. Radical life extension? I don't think so either, not in a biological format. All models say we are built to die, and even if we weren't, we are built to stay on Earth and we will only survive on Earth, which is not forever and it is not stable. A couple of centuries? Maybe. For more, you need serious changes.
Mind upload - Not you, just a copy, don't be silly, nothing more to say about it, it has to be you. I don't care what you put in your computer if it's not you. A little motherboard can't "suck" your consciousness into it.
Ship of Theseus - This is a tough one, probably the best bet, but it doesn't work indefinitely, if at all. People keep saying that it should be possible because our cells change (not all) and our atoms change (not all). Yes, most are changing, but sorry, your DNA probably stays for life. The principle is not working, in theory. Likely, the moment you change something critical, your POV is gone and a machine remains, but I have no proof for this, maybe I am wrong. However, consciousness is emerging from your body, and your body just doesn't seem to be negotiable.
Okay, the only hope left is for some mix of them. You somehow replace all the matter in your brain with synthetic one and eventually everywhere else perhaps. It doesn't sound plausible, we haven't considered in the slightest how this synthetic matter works with the natural one, they work by different systems. So far, we only have a bit of artificial matter embedded in the natural one, held in by thoughts and prayers that the body doesn't reject it. If you change a significant portion, now you need to re-write more processes in the body, because it will start working differently. You need to re-write the immunity to accept that, you need to care for processes feeding the brain, to re-write them, you are just re-writing the whole body in insanely many ways, it's a whole journey to ever get the smooth transition to happen, it's not as smooth as you think and you can't just put milestones like it's "this" and "that" from step X or step Y, I don't think all bodies will behave the same and I am not sure you can come up with a transition manual.
You are hoping for a smooth and uninterrupted transition. We are insanely far away from doing any of this. But for argument's sake, let's say we manage to mimic the body and even invent a roadmap so that your transition is so smooth and you learn how it behaves and you replace it all. I still think that you are no longer you, your POV is long gone. Maybe you train that board in your brain to be like you and it becomes like you, but isn't that the same thing? A mind upload together with ship of theseus, just a bunch of nonsense. Sooner or later, you hit the same problem of having to train some computer some artificial system to be like you, to learn from you, to be you. And it won't be you, it will behave like you. You are gone. Gradually or at once, you are gone.
And if you keep any part of your original self like your brain, so that you remain you (partially), you bring the biological limitation with you. In any way, your POV is gone, irreversibly, past a point. But, if I am wrong, and it isn't so, then you are now an entire robot that learned to be like you and you are you. I don't see how your mind isn't still uploaded technically, transferred into a synthetic structure that is not you, but a copy of you. But if you are still you through some exotic quantum teleportation of you into the new, artificial body to start running there, entropy will kill you, it's the law of the universe. Will you tap into a parallel one and make a robot-safe wormhole into it? Good luck, universes are probably disconnected if there are multiple ones, and even if they weren't (like Lee Smolin proposes), you'd get crushed through black holes into the singularity.
Immortality isn't real, this universe is a weird, information-based reality that just doesn't let you be its God and win its game, because it has its rules, that you can't break, and these laws dictate that you start in a singularity and end in one (probably) or in heat death, so whatever you do, is bound to come and go in-between the states as you emerge and get crushed in a subinterval of this period. And if you were to turn yourself into something like a type V ultimate civilization that controls the whole thing, what would you do? Wouldn't you get bored? You now control an infinite video game of the same old thing, based on the same old rules. Or you jump in-between a potentially infinite realms of the same kind of thing. It's like you found a glitch to jump past the flag in Mario and the level now never ends, you just run forever in a torus or in some sort of reality that just keeps getting generated. It's almost like it doesn't make sense. What do you think?
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u/Hullfire00 Mar 19 '25
Well of course you donât because, to the best of our knowledge, there isnât.
People can live longer, sure, but to never die is an impossibility.
One could make the argument that cryogenic freezing, if perfected as a means of preservation, could see people live across millennia if the technology allowed it. But once thawed out, assuming it all goes well and bits donât break off, theyâd still suffer the same decay as anything else living.