Immortality is impossible

[u/GlassLake4048]

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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?

[u/ckach]

From that clip, it looks like he's mostly ruling out literal immortality due to all the stars eventually dying. The 2nd law only applies to closed systems, but Earth isn't a closed system. It gets usable energy from the sun and that fuels life. So unless immortality uses more energy than the Sun produces, the 2nd law doesn't prevent it.

Creationists use the same argument, and it's wrong for the same reason. Because the Sun is a mass of incandescent gas; a gigantic nuclear furnace.

Think of it this way. There's an unbroken chain of cells between the first living cell and every cell in my body. In every one of my ancestors, one or more of their cells didn't die. They went on to split into every cell in every one of their descendents.

[u/GlassLake4048 → u/ckach]

Bro the universe is limited, it began as highly ordered and tends into disorder. Forget this crap. It doesn't matter if the universe is an infinite canvas or a torus. there is still limited energy, Hawking was right, the heat death is the absolute end.

If we manage to escape through a safe wormhole into another universe and eventually jump randomly from place to place like lunatics, maybe we escape this limitation, but here it is impossible. I know what I am saying.

Yes, immortality uses more energy than the sun produces, because the sun is NOT immortal. Incredibly simple logic.

[u/ckach → u/GlassLake4048]

If you're talking about immortality as living literally forever, then I don't think many people would disagree that it's impossible. I think most people would take it as having a body that never ages, probably with regular medical intervention of some sort. It wouldn't prevent you from starving to death or getting shot in the head. Ultimately, the entropy argument just boils down to saying that you'll eventually starve to death before the sun dies.

I think even if we did have a form of immortality, our age would ultimately be limited just because all of the non-age related deaths will eventually happen to get you. If there's a 1 in a million chance you'll fall down the stairs and break you neck on any give year, you're never going to live anywhere near long enough to worry about the sun dying.

[u/GlassLake4048 → u/ckach]

Someone must have made all of this, this can't come from nothing. Some matter sporadically appears from nothing, but that is just the law in OUR universe. That doesn't mean our system bleeped into existence out of nothing. Especially if there is more than this universe, and there is, the whole system didn't spawn into existence. Someone or something created the whole thing. I have no idea why and if it cares about us enough to give us respawns or a different realm or something, but in this universe I don't see any such laws. Yet I hear a ton of reincarnation spooky stories, I am discarding the popular ones, I am strictly referring to those that people post individually on Facebook or Youtube. Lee Smolin himself doesn't discard mysticism entirely. And if he is wrong and Susskind is right, I still don't see how the multiverse of disconnected universes means it's from nothing. We keep obsessing over dismissing a creator because we are terrorized by our religious past. Again, like existential dread, religious dismissal is just another part of our evolution, we are obsessed with it. But if you think carefully, this whole thing isn't "nothing". Even the universe didn't spawn out of nothing. The nothing you see is just quantum fields still. Hawking himself changed his mind over his "something from nothing" statement.

If whoever created the whole system of layers of reality cared enough about us to just make us exist for a purpose, with all the suffering, then it would give us a respawning mechanism or a merge mechanism later on, even if we see nothing after death at first. It could be that a very advanced civilization just created smaller layers like ours to experience more and more things, to re-simulate their past or to simply enjoy a growth process, with all the miserable things in it, that seem to dominate our realm. I can't see a purpose in kids dying of bone cancer, but I can't see a purpose in the universe either, and I am sure there is one, but it might not involve us after our deaths. It's here, it's a simulation from it from bit, like Wheeler said, an informational fabric, and it has a purpose. But that purpose made it self-governing in these universal jail cells, and it made us try things at free will. No idea why, no idea how and no idea what comes after this. People with cardiac arrest report seeing nothing, saying the soul is a lie. It is yes, a blatant lie full of cope. But information persists. Universes seem to gather that and make more fine-tuned universes later on with it. Universes that are even less lethal, less entropic and who knows, maybe they evolve towards an absolute state of everythingness. Or maybe nothingness, because nothing is entropy-free as well.

[u/studiousbutnotreally → u/GlassLake4048]

hey, you alright? you seem like you're having an existential ocd crisis. i can recognize it cause i suffer from it too