If we ask what might be the side-effects of immortality upon living beings as systems, then we must also ask "What will be the consequences for the systems within the environment upon which immortal life necessarily depends?.
Open any broadly focussed scientific book, or a sociological or a psychological one. You will be struck by how far our definition of 'the environment' extends and what aspects of it our existence intimately depends. The more one looks, and deduces from what one is reading about, the more sees the question "What side effects will immortality have upon the human organism?" as being fatally anthropocentric. The environment includes each one of us, and we are part of each other's environment'. We are not closed systems. We are part of a bigger system. Just because a rarely used cog or wheel in a time-piece does not betray its function does not mean it has none. You might find that out if you were to set an alarm to ring at some future time.
To consider our own immortality and its side-effects is to consider the origins and fate of the cosmos of which we are an integral part, even though we may feel alienated from it we have to accept that we are at the very least an attribute of its existence. And for us, at least, it is all that we can perceive of our own existence.
Could we be aware of our own existence floating free in a place where nothing but our own consciousness were present? Could that be immortality?
You see the concept of immortality cannot itself exist unless juxtaposed with that which is not immortal. In the same way life has no meaning, of itself, unless juxtaposed with non-life. And living with death.
Would a side effect upon our psyche of immortality be a morbid fascination with what the institutions of our immortal society would not allow us.... death? In the same way as sexually repressive cultures seem to generate a greater fascination for it in individuals denied appropriate behaviour than those that are less regimented.
The questions arising from this question could be endless. One would need to be immortal to address them all!
But, perhaps if we take a step back and look at the cosmic design, such as we can, from a macro systemic point of view, is it not itself and example of a single system able to be self-sufficient in space-time to the extent that it is that, of which we are a consumable part perhaps, which is an object lesson in what is required of a system design that is able to even approximate immortality? Or even to produce the phenomena of life and death which give the concept any meaning?
Just ask yourself... how many star-cycles of building and supernova, and of what power, were required to create the elements that give you life? And which continue to be required, almost daily, to sustain the body that you identify as 'yourself'. If you want that body to be immortal it must constantly renew its tissues, daily, weekly and monthly. But will the systems that enable the renewal continue to run for ever? Will we always have access to stocks of the elements that cycle through the internal systems of 'life and tissue death' upon which our immortal life would depend? In answering those questions sufficiently to become immortal we would also have to know how life is actually created. If we knew that we could do it, at will.
Would we then spend eternity scouring the cosmos for environments able to provide the elements and energy needed just to sustain our individual insistence upon selfishly holding on to consciousness for ever? To what purpose?
That purpose would need to be transcendent of the individuals' pre-occupation with remaining immortal, for it to have any substantive meaning. But in the context of finding purpose at the scale of time afforded by immortality that purpose must inevitably be conguent with the purpose not just of our cosmos but perhaps also with the very concept and answer to the question " Why is there not nothing?".
We do not need to be individually immortal to participate in answering that question. We just have to participate in sustaining, perpetually, what we call Humanity. And at the same time taking its present vector, the human species, into a resilient, sustainable and socially durable state of mutual help and cooperation. One in which we can promote its further evolution in adaptability such that we facilitate achieving that goal. All the time enjoying the journey of discovery it entails and of personal well-being for us all. Wherever in the cosmos we may disperse to.
Robin,
WOW! What a question. I had to read it several times to get the gist of your thought process. Bear with me as I attempt to articulate a response.
First of all, I believe there are givers and takers in this word. The givers having moved towards more of an egoless and the takers are more ego-centric which causes harm within their environment.
Humans over thousands of years have created dogma to explain the nature of the universe, the existence of humans, and the importance of morality. The reality is that both the Buddha and Jesus portrayed egoless characteristics. However, the Hindu belief structure goes beyond the human existence believes that all humans and members of the animal world are sentient beings and that have the ability to ascend or descend, depending on the life we live.
I believe that we as humans, animals, and inanimate beings have some form of a spirit that connects us all. We as humans have not learned to live in a peaceful or become sustainable and resilient. We are on a journey and it is with hope that we figure this out before we destroy creation here on Earth.
To answer your question, based upon my perspective, experience, and study, we as humans are immortal and the environment in which we exist is as well.
Now for your second part of the question:
"Would we then spend eternity scouring the cosmos for environments able to provide the elements and energy needed just to sustain our individual insistence upon selfishly holding on to consciousness for ever? To what purpose?" Or what is the meaning of life?
I think Alanis Morissette summed it up best in Dogma:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOYkdoSxazQ
On serious note, the meaning of life and our purpose is beyond my pay grade. Let me know your thoughts.
David
Immortality can not become blessing for the entire humanity . Human beings due to their resulting fruits of the previous lives & in his present life for their working action of their life path , they become more endorse in divinity & also the visualization with the resulting environment of global & planetary influence such human beings may totally in tranquil mood pass their life vision for the general welfare of human being as such I wish to prefer the guest of Immortality in this said environment .
This is my personal opinion
Robin,
Was your question rhetorical and you were simply postulating your position or was it intended as an actual question?
David
Does 'immortality of human beings' necessitate immortality of the environment supporting them?
I think yes. But since there exist no closed system, we must ask ourselves what exactly is the environment which should support immortal live. At the tiniest scale (atoms - or at least electrons, protons and neutrons) and at the largest scale (the universe) our environment seems to be stable. Therefore there is at least a minimal stability within the system - call it environment if you like - which should probably support immortality (maybe even in that most sophisticated version of immortality I described in your other question https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_your_vision_of_immortality_include_procreation )
What will be the consequences for the systems within the environment upon which immortal life necessarily depends?
That depends on the systems we want/need to rely on. As far as I understand it until now there will be a continuous demand for dead material which could be transformed into living material. Unfortunately, I do not know much about other side effects until now. But the 'morbid fascination with death' you mentioned can already be observed: There are many suicides, people vote for political parties which hazard the next world war, etc.
But, regarding the environment, there are many effects which are not necessarily side effects of immortality but, nevertheless, need to be addressed as well. For example, our sun will get hotter and hotter and will become a red giant which would at least melt our earth. Now, if we become immortal the question (which otherwise would be - at least for us and the next generations - completely irrelevant) arises what we should do:
- leave earth and look for a new 'home'
- save earth by moving it away from the sun (and what to do after that?)
- save sun (how?!)
Regarding 'a resilient, sustainable and socially durable state of mutual help and cooperation' you might have a look at my question 'Does anyone have an idea how to abolish money and replace it by something better?'
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_anyone_have_an_idea_how_to_abolish_money_and_replace_it_by_something_better
maybe it is interesting for you.
Best regards
Andreas
PS: If you have any further idea or question regarding the project, please do not hesitate to ask (or comment)! Science is driven by good questions, and your questions are really good - thanks for asking them in my project.
@David Vaughn
Hi David, You asked for my thoughts iro a) "To answer your question, based upon my perspective, experience, and study, we as humans are immortal and the environment in which we exist is as well. " and b) "the meaning of life and our purpose is beyond my pay grade. Let me know your thoughts.".
As humans (instances of the homo sapiens class of organisms) it is clear that we are not immortal since the sense of the word 'mortal' is that state in which individual instances of homo sapiens cease to function and also applies to similar state transitions of all other living organisms involving their eventual transition to non-living. There was a time in terrestial biology when life was abundant and death did not exist. The author Robert Audrey described it well, over 50 years ago.
For perhaps a billion years all of terrestrial life was expressed in single-cell organisms. Their only means of reproduction was to split into two identical cells. And to keep doing so. Then there was no death of individuals. Work out the math and you will see that if the system were closed Ardrey's 'primordial soup' would have described the result well. But it is untrue to say the system was without death, even though it may have been true of all individuals. A system is not properly described until all factors are described that have probability >0 of influencing any of the processes within the system. There lies the clue to follow should you wish to replace your belief that "all living beings are linked in some way". When you describe this primordial system of 'immortals' in this context one immediately sees that while 'natural' death was absent mass killings would have been commonplace. So much so that they have to be regarded as being a key system feature. Without inevitable repeating crises of local resource depletions, due to periodic environmental factors or from resource starvation due to over-consumption by open-ended reproduction within the biological system, there would be no inherent recycling of nutrients, the whole system would have quickly resulted the first mass killing being its final one. Because of it these events the early system was sustained long enough, and experienced similar repeating events often enough, for its organisms to evolve cooperative strategies that ameliorated the effects of open-ended reproduction and individual specialisms that took advantage of the mortal effects of commonplace environmental variations as well as self-initiated mass killings. Like the single-cell amoeba, if humans were immortal we would not be X-Men and would still be vulnerable to mass killing. To consider the environment within which we exists as also being immortal you may have thought you were stepping outside of the 'human system'. Perhaps now you can see that, in so far as our existence is posited upon the influences provided by what you term 'the environment', the human or any other 'system' within that, which is describable as 'its environment', is no more than a sub-system of the whole. And that 'the whole' is 'the system' with which we must always be thinking within, and about.
b) ""the meaning of life and our purpose...." is the quest that we are all engaged with when we follow the consequence for us of what I have written in answer to a). Pragmatically, as instances of a minor subsystem of the system yet having system-sourced attributes that make us seemingly uniquely aware of the 'big picture' within which we exist, we must accept or purpose and destiny, as indicated to us by the current state of our knowledge about ourselves and our relationships within 'the system' , to be discovering what is our purpose within it and by extension what is the purpose of the system of which we are a part. Your payment for considering this question, if that is a concern to you (perhaps you are still a 'family man'? :-)) ), will be to have fulfilled what is thus the manifest destiny of any instance of a sub-class of organisms, self-named 'homo sapiens', which seems to have become a vector within 'the system' for the asking of, formulating, and seeking the answer to those questions.
Caveat: the purpose of 'the system' must be assumed to be a 'goodness' so long as we accept that we are a part of it. Thus any actions we as individuals, or by cooperative malinformed misguidance we do together (and thereby try to escape responsibility for, in spite of recognising the negative effects of our cooperation upon 'our task' of fulfilling 'our destiny', such as it manifests at each point in our journey of learning more about it), which do not appear to contribute to us preserving and maintaining our individual wellbeing, and arguably growing our numbers AND our effectiveness, and thereby facilitate our capacity to fulfil 'our meaning' and 'our purpose' must by definition be classed as an 'evil'.
From this ethical and moral basis, or something similarly transcendent of, but not necessarily wholly destructive of, any and all antecedent localised 'creationary' conclusions arrived at across the planet, one can proceed to conceive and design that paradigm of socio-political relationships and economies of sustenance and development within which we can be assured, as much as we are able at each point in time, of enabling ourselves to evolve (as a species) such that we can make the contribution which at the moment appears to be expected of us.... according to the induction possible from the total knowledge and understanding that we have so far accumulated and which we cooperatively hold across the many minds that we have recently been able to link. First through speech, then writing and books, then telecommunications and now by mass communications between individuals and across populations, so that we can now see that soon we will truthfully be able to say 'we are one' and thus be confident that this has been 'good'. We just need to clean up our act.....
Dmitry Gorodetsky
The short answer to your question is "Yes". It is very hard to reach a consensus that the loss of a friend for any reason is a violation of a human right of the one who loses and the one who is lost.
The short reason for this lies in your moral viewpoint. It is centred on the principle that personal interests must always take precedence over the interests of one's community, even over one's species and ultimately over the entire web of life of which the individual is but once instance of.
Without belabouring the point, it then follows that your existence is the product of the development of the community which was able to produce you. That development has occurred in the context of an evolutionary process that is characterised by adaptive change in response to environmental pressures created by continually changing environments. The prerequisite for adaptive change of living beings, prior to evolution of conceptual thought giving rise to the capacity for actively dynamic behavioural change on scales shorter than that of reproductive generation, is the periodic death of individuals in every evolving species.
By being anti-death of individuals of your species you are also anti-evolution and as a consequence your position is that of being anti-life!
Your position creates a paradox. From a species survival point of view, except for this brief moment in time where some of us have come to imagine that we are masters of our own destiny independent from the vagaries of cosmic events, your concept of human rights is antithetical to the concept of human species rights. And you are a danger to its survival.
Many people understand this viewpoint that I have briefly outlined, even though they may not have articulated it. I expect it influences them in their responses to your attempts to convince them of the logic of your own self-centred morality.
Dear Robin Edward Jarvis
In its extensive but well-documented and well-argued introduction to the question before us, some aspects with which I fully agree and in that text stand out; There is the indispensable information to answer the specific question, which relates the immortality of the being with the immortality of the environment. From all this I make some considerations:
- The human being is a conscious life of being and shares with other entities of non-human nature, its same materiality and many physiological phenomena.
- Effectively we are made of "Star Dust", because the origin of life was carried out in an unlikely way by conditions in the Universe that allowed for slowing down the dispersion of matter and energy "Chaos" in niches or islands of organization or " Neguenthropy "giving rise to the" Cosmos ", open material and energy systems that were perfected; until, unexpectedly and apparently by evolution, life arose and then conscious life.
- It is true that for us humans to be immortal beings, our environment is required to be immortal; and thus, our changes and evolution will have the required agreement to gradually improve and reach new equilibria in said interdependent open systems.
- It is also true that the "Mortality of the sense of life and gives meaning to the own existence."
- Also, it is likely that humans individually increase their longevity, possibly up to 200 or 250 years, but not infinitely. Although as a species "Homo Sapiens" if we can prolong our stay in the Universe, as long as we are aware of taking care of our home the Earth and our neighborhood, the Solar System.
- Lacking resources on our planet Earth, by evolution of technology, we can explore and colonize other planets or travel to other solar systems, although the duration of the trip consumed within the "Ships Cities" several generations of humans. The maximum work of science fiction that describes this, for the moment utopia, is that of Isaac Asimov "Foundation and Empire" and "Return to the Second Foundation".
Greetings and congratulations for such an interesting question and so documented introduction.
Jose Luis
There are many factors that must be fulfilled in order for people to reach the stage of immortality, and the idea of immortality prevails in all humans from the first and the next.
It is the most arid subject of most human beings especially pigeons throughout the ages, a good example of this is the ancient Egyptians, the pharaohs and the process of embalming.
هنالك أفكار وطرق عديدة استخدمها البشر على مر العصور بشأن إمكانية الخلود والتحنيط وبناء قبور ذات مواصفات ومستلزمات خاصة كي لا تتفسخ الجثة.
Dmitry Gorodetsky
Hi Dmitry, I agree entirely with your your points 4 through 6. The evolution (not at the pace of biological reproduction) of a strong social responsibility in each human being is the basis of the Vox Populi project. One can equally well call it 'development'. What I am showing in that project, though not much is just published here, is that the efficient and enduring way to achieve this transformation requires the creation of a vision of life and existence itself, a worldview if you may, which enthuses mankind. This is no different from a belief system, just as neo-liberalism and its fellow travelling philopshical dialects is a belief system. But in this case it is self aware and the need for its own evolution is embedded in itself, just as its recognition that it is a hyper-belief, or meta-belief as I have referred to it before. One which consciously seeks to do minimum harm to existing beliefs by promoting within them those aspects of them which are consistent with the inferences arising from the, very few , elements of the archeo-metabelief. In this way broadly based and enduring acceptance is more likely.
I would love to converse with you offline, either through RG messaging or start that way then we can move to direct emails and Skype. I have to pop out now for a short while. best regards, Rob
If all the eggs of a frog would have developed in baby frogs the entire planet would have only with frogs in due course of time.
In nature this never happens and so there is equilibrium in our environment.
Similarly we should not even think of our immorality.
Subir, Exactly... Immortality of the individual, especially as a 'fundamental right' as some suggest, negates the vaildity of the process by which individuals of any species have arrived at this point. What s special about this point in time which suddenly gives the survival of individuals rights which are superior to that of the species from which he appeared? The individual is the transient element in the permanent mechanism by which the species seeks to perpetuate itself (cf: The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkin 1976).. for an individual to seek to turn all individuals into immortals would be an act of treason against the species if its goal is its survival (and continuing evolution) rather than its brief flowering as 'immortals' that one by one get picked off by accident, disaster and happenstance followed by extinction.
Even my focus on species survival in the context of humanity is somewhat arrogant. Nature loves to hedge its bets through massive diversity in every instance even within what we call species. The 'system' is perhaps, and probably so, life itself.
We should consider ourselves as just one candidate life-form which may or may not 'beat the odds' and be constructive in 'life' succeeding in achieving its ultimate goal, whatever it is that that may be. It just seems to us, because of awareness of our own sentience and capacity to consciously alter our environment and provide ourselves with tools, that being driven to explore and understand and survive that we are the best equipped in our part of the cosmos to carry that out and should respect that understanding by seeking to 'work with the system' and rather than against it. That system appears to use life and death to adapt itself to the changing conditions in whatever part of the cosmos it manifests. But also uses the evolved capacity for adaptive behaviours in a species for more rapid adjustments within the periodicity of the reproductive cycle. But we know, often to our cost, as we get older and more experienced as individuals that 'you cannot teach an old dog new tricks' and so beyond a certain age an individual's resistance to behavioural adaptation contributes to stasis in a society's behavioural adaptations. In elderly individuals these negative effects perpetrated by them must reach a level where they outweigh their positive contributions to communal wisdom and experiential knowledge. Immortal or not, the species' 'selfish gene' requires them to die. For the safety of the species. Humanity in our case. That is one part of Humanitarian.
The other part is for individuals to self-consciously be aware that 'they are are because the species is' and to happily contribute to life and to seek to be happy in doing that. This means following and adapting behaviours that serve the 'we' of which they (you and I) are a part, at the species level, through the community and the broader social structures. Ultimately dying is one part of that service. Just as not overpopulating the environment during a time of plenty that causes the destruction of the environment in seasonal times of shortage such that the entire population ends up extinct. The pursuit of life is not necessarily rewarded with more life. It is most likely to have the unintended consequence of more death and even the death of the last individual.
This trap also exists amongst the 'green movement' in which some adherents see all ecological change as a bad thing, not pausing to examine which are 'natural changes' that might be welcomed and which are the unintended consequences of our own actions. My favorite anecdote is the time my best friend, and ardent bird lover, travelled hundreds of miles to shoot ducks blown in from Argentina on the jet stream over the South Atlantic to the South African Highveld, to prevent them interbreeding with the resident South African species! This was a natural process. Species classification is a figment of human invention!
Enough said, I think!
best regards, Rob
I'm not really sure that we will become immortal, for now we have managed to live longer than we thought, unfortunately our health has not improved, the elderly have many chronic illnesses, and I think the environment is so damaged that I do not think we sustain more than two future generations if we do not do something to change it
I want to ask: Why do us need to be physically immortal, if there is a possibility of becoming immortal in our good deeds in the memory of humanity? For example, Ludwig van Beethoven is immortal, because he left to humanity his brilliant compositions that give people happiness and joy. Beethoven turned his personal tragedy (complete deafness) into brilliant compositions like the "Appassionata" and the "Ninth Symphony". If we remember his patrons as Prince Likhnovsky and Prince Lobkowitz, it is thanks to Beethoven, otherwise these high-ranking people would be completely unknown. There are many such examples. It is necessary to understand that physical life is worth just so much as committed good deeds for mankind. In this context, the long term of life of people does not matter.
Thank you Gennady. You address at least 3 important facets of life and the survival of life. First, it is the quality of the life journey we are each able to and also enabled to undertake that is individually important. Second, that quality is defined by the positive contributions we make in the lives of others, individually and of others in general. These are our interfaces with our species, and with each of the others in the biosphere within which we are all mutually dependant. Lastly, that what evidence we have of longevity in practice suggests that it is subject to significant rates of declining returns to scale as regards both hedonistic and altruistic outcomes, and is not to be recommended on grounds of both social and personal utility!
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Kinesiology
- Running