Emortalist Practice Options

[till]

Over the next few weeks I'll make available the contents of the book in this topic. The chapters, all except for the one about space-migration, are fairly small, and so should fite nicely into the context of a post. Those that don't will be broken up.

If you want to know what the book's all about, just read on. The chapters will be placed here as they appear in the book itself. This placement is eclectic, but, believe it or not, there is a thread of sorts.

Comments are welcome, but I would appreciate it if they stayed on-topic and didn't go off on bizarre tangents, as forum comments are often wont to do.

Thanks for that, and happy reading.
Till

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time—well, actually it was in the middle of the 20th century C.E.—in what then was ‘West’-Germany, a boy was born. His parents, following an inexplicable whim, gave him a ‘first’ name of some significance; a name that, when the boy years later emigrated into English-speaking regions of the world, assumed strange significance.
The boy’s family were artists. He grew up surrounded by books. TV was a long way off, and when it came it was rationed because it was, of course, the tool of the devil. Not in a religious sense, because there were no overt religious beliefs in the family, but because it was considered a tool the destruction of culture as it was known. Which it was, though the worst testimony to its community-destructiveness was in evidence only years later, in a small fishing village in the north of Spain, where the family went on a yearly basis.
At the age of six(-ish)—precise details are lost in the fog of memory, though the substance is accurate—the boy had an experience that would change his life forever. One night, lying on his bed in the dark, he thought about himself dying. And, young though he was, he was gifted—or cursed—with sufficient imagination to at least have an inkling of what it might mean not to be anymore. And he really, really didn’t like it. And he cried, and his mother came, but her consolations were worse than inadequate. She told him that it was nothing to worry about, That it was all right. That one day he would understand that it was all right. That, in any case, it wouldn’t happen to him for a long, long time.
Unconsoled, the boy finally went to sleep, and when he woke up the world didn’t look so bad any more. But from that day on, the thought of death was going to be a presence in his life, and though it might have been almost forgotten in the events of the light of day, it revisited him during the night, as it does to all of us, when we’re set upon by our most dreaded notions—when the night is darkest and dawn is just around the corner.
Life was never the same after horrible insight. The boy had looked his personal extinction in the face, and had seen it for what it was. The end of thought. The end of feeling. The end of hope. The end of everything. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Still, life went on. There was school, then high-school. There were the pressures of growing , with all its complexities and pitfalls, its glories and humiliations, its victories and disappointments, leaving little time for careful consideration of the knowledge lurking somewhere just below the threshold of awareness.
Still, if only he had understood himself better, he would have noticed the signs; would have related much of what he did and thought and felt to what he had known since that night. Would have understood his almost compulsive obsession with the future, which inevitably led him, a voracious reader, to science-fiction. In those days, in Germany, there were a number of really badly written pulp sci-fi series, that came out in weekly installments. He read them all, spending almost all his pocket money on this kind of stuff; much to the chagrin of his parents, who had inherited a tradition of reading, but of a somewhat classier kind, and who considered pulp magazines to be unhealthy literature.
Of course, he also read other things, among them the imaginative travel adventures of the German writer Karl May; but when he came to the end of his teens, science-fiction definitely outweighed all his other readings by a large factor. Plus crime fiction and Westerns; not all pulp, because his parents had an extensive library of paperbacks of all sorts of genres.
A significant portion of the youth’s pulp literature was contributed by a science fiction series called Perry Rhodan. It was the story of an astronaut who went to the moon, there came upon the stranded spaceship of a human-like race of aliens. Five hundred volumes later—that’s one volume per week, 52 weeks per year, and so we’re talking about a period of about ten years here!—Perry Rhodan ruled over a large human ‘empire’ (well, it was a German series after all!) and had just returned from the galaxy M87, where he had battled yet another threat to mankind. You get the drift, yes? If you want to get a notion of the spirit of Perry Rhodan: Der Erbe Des Universums (‘Perry Rhodan: Heir to the Universe’), go and get yourself from Amazon.com a CD with music (same title) by Christopher Franke, who also did the soundtrack for that amazing TV series Babylon 5. Perry Rhodan is still alive and well in Germany, though the weekly pulps are history now. The first editions are probably worth a mint.
A hero of Perry Rhodan’s scope can hardly survive what eventually amounted to over thousand volumes by living to eighty and becoming progressively geriatric and decrepit. So, the writers early-on introduced a way of avoiding aging, using a method called a Zelldusche, which translates into ‘cell shower’; a notion that, 40+ year on still has elements of definite interest. Said method of prolonging life was provided by an alien species, a kind of super-being; and was initially provided as periodic treatments and then by using a device called a Zellaktivator (‘Cell Activator;) issued in limited numbers, meaning that someone actually had to decide who was going to benefit from it. Very undemocratic, but what can you do if there’s only a dozen or so of these things to go around? It was the elite, of course, who got it, and they ruled humanity benevolently and wisely and all that, and defended it against the threats from evil aliens, who wanted to dominate the galaxies of the universe. And maybe it should be mentioned that not all of the elite were human. Undemocratic: yes. Speciesist: no.
Think about it: 500+ pulp magazines, provided on a weekly basis, in which the notion of immortality being possible…that’s certainly an excellent way of keeping the notion in the forefront of one’s mind. It wasn’t deliberate, but it happened.
Among the youth’s plans for life—with no notion as to how to ever implement them—was to go to Mars one day. But with Astronaut-dom not really feasible, he decided to study astrophysics instead. He did, for a year and a half, before life prompted him to quit university and emigrate to the opposite side of the world, to Australia. There followed more traveling, across South and Central America, a return to university to study more physics, but with a more biological theme. Years later there was marriage and two daughters, more moving around the world with ‘the job’, eventual settlement in New Zealand and, even later, re-settlement in Australia.
When he first left Germany, the youth, now past his teens, took up writing. Short stories to begin with. ‘Imaginative’ stuff mainly, with science-fiction and related genres featuring prominently. Changing languages was a bit of a bother and writing was clumsy and stilted for many years. After much groping and attempts at coming to grips with telling stories, finally there was a novel called Keaen, which a publisher bought and, after long delays, it finally saw the light of day (and Amazon.com). Four sequels followed, and the series, set on a planet called ‘Tethys’, isn’t finished yet. There also are novels unrelated to the series, plus occasional screenplays.
The whole ‘fiction’ thing probably came about because at one stage the now-man decided that it was pointless to try and persuade people of anything by writing non-fiction. Besides, he found out that, having put the initial language issues to rest, he was damn good at story-telling. The only people he actually looks up to, are story tellers; led on by Jack Vance and, more importantly in relation to the ‘immortality’ thing, Robert Heinlein; who qualifies as a ‘prophet’ of sorts, with Time Enough for Love being the closest thing to a reference book on the subject.
‘Immortality’ as a kind of subtext to life and motivation was a constant companion, but it never became explicit until sometime in late 1973, when the man picked up a book, written by Alan Harrington, called The Immortalist. Next to the night-time revelation that had came to the six-year old, reading The Immortalist qualifies as probably the most significant ‘wake-up’ event in the man’s life. It was an “Of Course!”-book, if ever there was one. And it was then that he became an avowed, unapologetic, though clandestine, immortalist.
‘Clandestine’, because the 1970s and the years that followed were a time when those inclining in similar directions were ‘fringe’ and, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain strange, to the point of freakish and weird. Earnest, yes, but strange for the most part nonetheless. The main reason for this was that achieving immortality—meaning an indefinite lifespan—appeared quite impractical from a scientific point of view. A lot of critical research was yet to be done and technology to be developed, especially on the information-processing front. Therefore, those wanting to live forever were almost forced to consider alternatives qualifying as either ‘spiritual’ or seriously-fringe-science. This means that the field attracted weirdos like rotten meat attracts flies; and it was prudent not to let on that one had similar predilections. Besides, despite Harrington’s enthusiasm, the only real prospect on the immortality front was cryonics, whose utility is at the very least dubious. Meaning that the prospects for this becoming ‘real’ were dim.
Public reaction being what it was, if the topic came up at all, it was also prudent to at least dissemble and make any immortalist aspirations into something that could be passed off as a joke or an aspect of one’s personal quirks, but nothing too serious; because if ‘serious’ it appeared, that might seriously threaten not just one’s social environment, but also the professional one. Because the man had a family to feed, certain things just were left unsaid.
Thirty-five years later, they need not be left unsaid anymore. Science and technology are on the brink of allowing even those in their 50s and healthy to achieve ‘escape velocity’. The subject of ‘immortality’ has become a target of concern and often scornful vituperation at the highest levels of governmental and religious organizations. Private organizations promoting longevity have sprung up like weeds and are flourishing, even though most of those not blatantly commercial and often peddling snake-oil still lack the skills and savvy to do really serious promotion where it is needed. The Web is riddled with people interested in the subject, as well as related ones, like ‘transhumanism’. Serious longevity and even ‘immortality’ are becoming staple fare of, unfortunately mostly sensationalist, ‘news’ reporting. The subject is ‘out there’ and has come into its own—with all the attendant problems of an enterprise that will, ultimately and if the species doesn’t destroy itself, change literally everything.
The once-six-year-old watches it all with wary circumspection; for, after thirty five years as a ‘conscious immortalist’—or, as he prefers, a conscious ‘emortalist’—and more than fifty years of being an Emortalist at least in spirit, he is afraid that the enterprise might yet fail, if only because of the myopia and blinkeredness of many of those in the immortalist movement; who should know better, but don’t seem to be able to look at things from what one might think of as an ‘emortalist perspective’.
To fail to achieve, or at the very least to delay unnecessarily, what is already within our grasp, because of these deficiencies, would be a tragedy. And so the man decided to put fiction writing to one side for a little while, and instead to pen this monograph.

END OF CHAPTER

(more in a few days...)

[brokenportal]

Nice, books like these are gold to the memedom. This sounds a lot like me and I know a lot of others around here will relate.

I hate it when that snake bastard death slithers into my thoughts at night too and taunts me with the impending hell of obliteration.

I also think that the part about delay being tragedy is an important topic. Together our efforts forge the tools that will slay the reaper in our life times. Divided we obliterate.

[till]

Thanks, but I think you'd better wait until you read on. 30+ years of living with Emortalism has resulted in things thought of aren't going to please some people. I'll get back to that somewhat further in the book.

From the back cover:

With significant human life extension just around
the corner, the world is utterly unprepared for the
changes that are about to come upon us.

This book is a personal statement, of what it may
mean to be an Emortalist, of the responsibilities
attendant with being one. Change always comes
at a price, and the more significant the change the
higher that price.

Our species will never reach the distant future if we
we aren’t prepared to pay the price; if we don’t take
care of the immediate future first.

[brokenportal]

Are you saying pretty much that we should clean up the earth and poverty and stuff before we worry so much about life extension?

Well one things for sure, we wont be able to help clean stuff up and help solve other problems when we are dead.

Not to mention the continuous death of our knowledged and experienced problem solvers doesnt help things any, and the world doesnt need to spend all their time creating life extension. We can and do work on all these other problems right along with it. There are even entire life extension organizations working to organize them more efficiently, like the lifeboat foundation for example.

If helping to make the world a better place is the price I have to pay as a person with an Indefinite Healthy Life Extension then I will gladly pay that price. Hell Ill pay it twice, hell Ill dedicate my whole life to it, because thats what life is about isnt it? Continuously enabling a better future for yourself and others.

Not to mention, as I heard Aubrey outline somewhere, man kind is always going through times of great change, and people are always saying that we wont be able to handle them. Like the onset of the industrial revolution, the sex revolution, the technological revolution, etc...

Thanks, but I think you'd better wait until you read on. 30+ years of living with Emortalism has resulted in things thought of aren't going to please some people. I'll get back to that somewhat further in the book.

From the back cover:

With significant human life extension just around
the corner, the world is utterly unprepared for the
changes that are about to come upon us.

This book is a personal statement, of what it may
mean to be an Emortalist, of the responsibilities
attendant with being one. Change always comes
at a price, and the more significant the change the
higher that price.

Our species will never reach the distant future if we
we aren’t prepared to pay the price; if we don’t take
care of the immediate future first.

[niner]

What's with the spelling? Emortalist? Does that have some special meaning, or is it just a typo?

[till]

Are you saying pretty much that we should clean up the earth and poverty and stuff before we worry so much about life extension?

Ah, no; not at all.

Look, there's no point in repeating everything that's in my book. It'll come out in instalments over the next few weeks, so you'll find out what I mean. On the other hand, if you can't wait that long, feel free to download the book from lulu. The downloaded PDF is only $2.95, which I'm sure you can afford!

My point is that I wrote the book partially to sum up a number of issues I found myself coming back to when talking to people or blogging or whatever. I spent several weeks on it and I really think that was time enough. The book now exists and if people really want to know what I think, well, there it is! Way I see it, time is the most precious of all widely-available commodities. I have invested significant time of my life to write this; and I didn't have to write it; could have spent my time doing considerably more profitable things, spent time with my family and friends, written some more stuff on my next novel, done more sword practice, and so on. Thing is, when you come down to the basics, I wrote this book mostly for the benefit of others (unlike my novels, which I enjoy writing!). It's being serialized here as a courtesy to the Imminst people. However, anybody wants the full thing, feel free to get the whole book. It'll answer many questions you might have, though its intention is to create even more.

[till]

What's with the spelling? Emortalist? Does that have some special meaning, or is it just a typo?

Look here.

[zoolander]

[till]

EMO

Hmm. Got a point there methinks. Indeed, that's partially the topic of the book.

This post has been edited by till: Nov 8 2008, 06:39 AM

[Lazarus Long]

Way I see it, time is the most precious of all widely-available commodities. I have invested significant time of my life to write this; and I didn't have to write it; could have spent my time doing considerably more profitable things, spent time with my family and friends, written some more stuff on my next novel, done more sword practice, and so on. Thing is, when you come down to the basics, I wrote this book mostly for the benefit of others (unlike my novels, which I enjoy writing!).

So which is it?

You do realize that you switched justifications in mid stream. You start out with an extension of your basic premise that is based on *time* as a precious commodity because it is short supply, A premise that permeates a considerable part of your thesis and by default that time loses value when the supply goes up so we should be careful about inflating the time we have because if we get too much time then it won't be worth as much given the laws of scarcity economics.

However you didn't conclude that way. Your actual conclusion is a non sequitor of the assertion and has nothing to do with time as a commodity but in fact invalidates your initial assertion because you chose to act altruistically even though it was not a labor of love (this is certainly debatable based on the definition of love) but of social obligation. It would be erroneous or deceptive to claim you do not think it was a worthy use of your time because you have already claimed a value based on a contribution to society, what you said is that you don't consider it to have been fun.

Do you really think that if you had more time in your life all you would pursue are tasks that are more fun?

Or don't you agree that a considerable amount of your tasks would also include addressing issues of social importance, or any other extended task beyond your personal (selfish) demands that you consider worthy of such sacrifice?

Our willingness to sacrifice our labor and our selves to tasks beyond our sole individual advantage does not require *less* time in our lives to become popular. Nor does having more time inevitably mitigate it.

This issue is as confused for most people as it is for you. Many have made this false connection between treating time as a commodity and the worth of our lives, the problem is that the worth of our lives is an abstract awareness established internally by our values and our consistency of conduct with them and externally by the impact of that conduct on the lives of others and life in general. This can be accomplished in the moment an infant learns to smile or a parting wisdom on a death bed but is not based on the *amount* of time between.

The worth of our life is created by the *values* we invest in it not by the amount of time we value. Time only allows us the advantage of conduct true to those values or the opportunity to fail and learn from the experience, helping us to better attain consistency with those values.

Time gives us the chance to grow and learn values we heretofore might have never considered. The true values of compassion and intelligence and information and observation and exploration even though they can be obscured by the vicissitudes of time on occasion. We will all know suffering at one *time* or another and some in their pain will try to erase their knowledge of true value, use their failure derived guilt and bitterness to rationalize a false set of values but this is not due to having more time in life, nor less, it is due to the evolution psychology and biology of how pleasure and pain are experienced within the mind.

For example given enough time the true value of love will inevitably come to dominate the minimal worth of hate. Time is not the force of corruption, it is merely a companion aspect to the process of decay. Like travel; distance over time. Both growth and decay require time and having more time does not lend value to growth and learning, only opportunity. Nor does more time in life mitigate the threat of decadence and despair, in fact it would only prolong it but provide with each waking moment another opportunity for a reversal of ill fortune.

[till]

Ahh, Laz, I am not one for the finer points of philosophy, I'm afraid, and so I'll instead continue with the Introduction and the chapter following, entitled "Emortalist Philosophizing".

Introduction

This book is not a treatise, a learned tome, a carefully structured introduction to Emortalism, a proselytizing rant, a biography, or any of a number of other things I can’t think of right now. It is instead a spontaneous, mostly unedited, personal statement written with people in the immortalist/transhumanist ‘community’ in mind.
Its purpose, insofar as it has one, is nebulous, though clearly it has one; otherwise why would I spend significant chunks of my life and thinking time to write it. I do have more on my plate than I can eat; and, really, another project?...
So, it’s going to be a short book, with lots of flow-of-consciousness topics, no references for materials I might be talking about, and definitely no endless editing cycles.

Names matter, and this book’s title includes the term to ‘Emortalism’, because I’m not going to talk about ‘immortality’, which is a corrupt and overloaded term that does more harm than good, especially when it comes to ‘publicity’ issues. Instead I prefer to use ‘Emortality’, a term coined by Alvin Silverstein and first used publicly in his book The Conquest of Death, of which I happen to have a treasured signed copy.
The first time I came across the term was in a novel called Eternity by Mack Reynolds, and it was only years later that I discovered the true origin of the word.
The ‘E’ in ‘Emortality’ stands for ‘ex’, that being a Latin suffix denoting ‘out’. ‘Ex-mortal’ thus means something like living outside mortality, with ‘mortality’, so much is clear from Silverstein’s context, referring to the kind that kills through what right now is considered ‘natural’ old-age decay, disease and so on. Hence ‘emortal’ denotes a state of affairs where one has stepped out of and/or is outside that framework of necessity.
This contrasts with ‘immortality’, which implies a deathless life. I consider ‘immortality’ an oxymoron. Though I will use it occasionally, it is usually for the purpose of reference to a particular group of people. Thus I may refer to the ‘immortalist/transhumanist’ community, because that’s how these people might refer to themselves. But that is all.

This book is not meant to provide answers, but to stimulate questions. I caution the reader to remember this. Whenever you appear to come across an ‘answer’ of sorts, or some statement that doesn’t have a bunch of sentences or paragraphs of justification attached to it, think of it as a question.
Living with questions instead of answers is the most important thing you will need to learn if you want to live as an Emortal. If you don’t, you’ll end up as a moron, and sooner or later—probably sooner than you’d think right now—you’ll kill yourself. That’s because life lived around ‘answers’ is ultimately boring and, as you’ll find out in due course, devoid of meaning. Life revolving around question, on the other hand, is almost infinitely interesting.
Maybe the main point I would like to put across in this little volume is this: ‘Being emortal’ isn’t just a state of being physically long-lived. Being emortal is all about living as if you were emortal, or at least as if you were living in the initial phases of an emortal existence. It’s a state of mind. Not something that you might be one day when the world obliges you and gives you what you want, but something that you ought to act out as if it already were so.
The way I like to look at it is like: “Well, I’m waiting for a problem to be solved; but solved it will be, and so now let’s think about the future with that in mind.”
What are the consequences? How will I and we deal with them? What needs to be done? What do I need to do? Now. What do I need to be, so that things will work out? What will it mean for those people I care about? What price will I have to pay, so that things will work out—for me, for my loved ones, for every-damn-body? For nothing is ‘free’. Only fools think otherwise, and Emortals can’t afford to be fools.
If you train yourself to think that way, to feel that way, to act that way in whatever you do, suddenly you may find that things in life are different; very much so—even if you are unfortunate enough not to make it into humankind’s next stage of history. At least you did what you could.

Emortalist Philosophizing

Emortalists, like the rest of those of a transhuman disposition, are an elite. By that I don’t mean that they are better than those who aren’t similarly disposed: just that they are different and in a minority; and they are, let’s face it, just a tad ahead of the times—at least right now. In that sense they satisfy the requirements for ‘elitism’. They also, by and large, think of themselves as an elite, even though for many of them that’s an un-PC way of looking at things.
With Emortalist elitism usually comes a tendency to philosophize more than your average Joe or Jane. This may not be the case in a future when Emortalism is commonplace—though I suspect it will always be an issue, for a number of reasons—but right now, in the initial stages of the greatest revolution in human life, it definitely comes with a philosophical overhead. However, since people are lazy and tend to vector in on answers, rather than continuing to ask more probing questions, a lot of them try to get the philosophizing over and done with, find their answers and then go ahead and keep philosophy on a utilitarian backburner. They find some comfortable modus vivendi and soon settle into a mental rut not dissimilar to that of your average deathist. Inquiry metamorphoses into answer-provision and dogma. Said dogma usually maximizes the emotional comfort level of the individual concerned.
During my years as an Emortalist I’ve come across a scintillating range of emortalist dogma/ideology, ranging from that of Leonard Orr’s ‘Rebirthers’ and Stuart Otto’s Affiliated Christian Immortalists, to T. Kun’s Project Mind, the Cryonics crowd and the posthumanist believers. I cannot help but be touched by their earnestness, because I understand the source of their desires. However, I am also put off by what amounts to their unwillingness to think just a few steps beyond the point where they apparently stop thinking. This is a common human failing, but in Emortalists it’s much more consequential than in the rest of humanity. It is not without irony that this refusal to think further than one’s nose is also necessary.
Ideology, secular or religious, accompanies most of human social organization. It’s like social glue. Groups that buck the general trend of things are even more in need of such glue than those whose practices find no resistance and basically go with the flow. Said ‘flow’ is social flow, of course; whatever happens to be ‘in’ at the time and the place.
Fervor can be generated in two ways: (a) by what amounts to mass-hysteria, where everybody thinking alike produces an avalanche of thinking-alike and believing-alike; and (b) a need to very, very much believe, preferably unquestioningly, in something, in order to see oneself and one’s companions through difficult times, where everybody seems to be against you and difficulties pile up into apparently insuperable mountains.
The Emortalist movement certainly needs such fervor, no question about it. The forces arrayed against it are formidable. Fervor to the point of approaching religiosity is probably helpful. You got to believe something, and you got to believe that this something is worthy bringing sacrifices for. Mere ‘fear of death’ may be an initial impetus, but it’s not enough to sustain a movement. You need ideological rationalization, making it appear as if what you’re doing is actually somehow necessary good, a task ordained by ‘nature’ or the ‘cosmos’ or ‘God’ or whatever. Thus come into existence pseudo-rational philosophies that often, when you poke around in them a bit, make little sense; but what sense there is serves their purpose well enough.
Whatever philosophy one adopts tends to be a tool to justify what one wishes to achieve. In the emortalist case, the philosophies adopted purport to explicate why Emortalists want to live forever, or at the very least ‘indefinitely’. It doesn’t much matter whether they believe that God is very favorably inclined toward those wanting to be more-than-human, or whether they believe that, as the Christopher Franke song says “Time will have all the answers to the ancient questions”; and especially, as I hear again and again, the answer to the question as to our ‘real purpose in life’, or something along those lines.
I’ve been through a few philosophies in my lifetime; meaning that I’ve believed, if not six impossible things before breakfast, then at least some stuff that ultimately turned out to be either wishful delusion or unsupported by any shred of evidence. I’ve also leaped to erroneous and facile conclusions, just because I stopped thinking when I shouldn’t have. Par for the course. Maybe more so than your average Joe Blog, because I’ve done more thinking about such issues, much to the dismay of quite a few people around me, who thought and maybe still think, that I overdo the thinking.
After some 50 years of this, give or take a few, however, I’ve finally settled on a philosophy that provides me with no reason whatsoever as to why I or anyone else should have any ‘right’ at all to live forever—or any right at all to any damn thing, for that matter. I haven’t done this because it’s convenient or expedient to do so, but simply because I’ve found no evidence whatsoever to suggest that things are any different than I now suspect them to be. And, yes, I’m being cautious; not to hedge my bets, but because, like you and you and you (and you, too!), I actually ‘know’ diddly-squat about the real big picture; and I’m acutely aware that there may well be no way to sort out what’s what and whether, as the participants in an ongoing discussion in theoretical physics might see it, it’s all ‘random’ or ‘hidden variables’; or, as I sometimes suspect, neither of the two, which may well be the reason why the discussion is not going anywhere fast. This usually happens when the questions makes no sense.
But I digress.
The philosophical direction I have taken, after decades of finding dead alleys everywhere else, is known as ‘Absurdism’. If you don’t know what that is, look up the Answers.com or Wikipedia pages on the subject. In essence, Absurdism states that we’ll never figure out about the purpose/meaning of life, the universe and everything, because such a purpose/meaning simply may not exist. Even if it does exist, however, which is possible and we really can’t say for certain that it does not, it’s not something that we can ever ‘discover’, in the sense of making it ‘explicit’. Still, despite all that, we can make our lives mean something, but it’s not necessary that we do, and if and when we do, said ‘meaning’ is fabricated and illusory, though it may serve to make us feel good. It makes us feel good, because it appears to produce discernible, non-random, patterns in our lives; and our brains are pattern-recognizing and pattern-creating machines and ‘feel’ best when we operate in a suitably ‘patterned’, apparently-predictable and non-random, context.
It’s all very ‘Tao’, I know, but there you have it. And it’s definitely ‘atheist’, though that is not at the core of it, but a mere detail.
The best and most accessible contemporary pop-culture examples of Absurdism can be found in the works of Joss Whedon (‘Buffy’, ‘Angel’, ‘Firefly’ TV series) or in the now-finished science-fiction TV series ‘Farscape’. Also, ironically, there was an excellent series about life after death, 'Dead Like Me', that was maybe more challengingly Absurdist than anything Joss Whedon ever produced.
Absurdism emphasizes the importance of choice, standing up for one’s choices and facing up to their consequences, intended or not. Oddly enough, it is highly moralistic—which appears paradoxical, given that in a cosmos with no guidelines provided by some higher purpose or meaning, what could one possible reference one’s morality to? Who provides moral authority if not some higher being, or maybe an intelligent and wise cosmos, or whatever?
The answer is that nobody does, yet that does not make ‘moral authority’ into an oxymoron; nor does it make for ethical relativism. It merely replaces some absolute authority by that of the individual. Ethical relativism is avoided by accepting the authority of one’s personal choices, if you will. And, yes, while others may make their own choices, and while we must accept that they do, we are still at liberty to disagree with those choices and declare that life as we would have it, should be governed by ethical and moral guidelines that we choose; and if we allow someone else to choose them for us than that, too, is a choice. The main question then is how to choose to act after having made those ethics/morals/values choices. Do we invade that country to stop the genocide there, or do we stand by and say “It’s their country!”? Do we convert these people to see the light of the True God? Stuff like that.
The important thing to realize when considering such matters is this: There is a difference between accepting that other people make their own choices and accepting those choices and their consequences!
This is a difficult path to follow, because it is so apparently paradoxical. Also, it’s almost a built-in that we think that the only way to make choices is by accepting, at least at some level, that the criteria by which we choose are somehow universal or absolute; that is, they would be accepted as valid and applicable by any rational creature.
The problem here lies, of course, with the very notion of ‘rationality’, which is assumed to be some gold-standard for judgment—which it isn’t: ‘rationality’ is merely a label for a manner of certain categories of thought-processes.
I digress yet again.
The point I’m trying to make is that there is no objective way of determining what is right or wrong, or what should or should not be done in any given circumstance. There’s only choice—to do this or that. Ultimately the choices that affect the world around us, including the ‘social’ world, are the ones expressed in ‘action’. They may have internal precursors—like we may choose to pick this or that mental position; “should I turn left or right?”—but until we actually have gone left or right, the outside world may remain unaffected by whatever happened ‘inside’. Or consider Jimmy Carter’s admission, many years back, that he had ‘committed adultery in [his] heart’. Until he mentioned it, the non-committed adultery had no effect on the world; unless one wants to point out the, philosophically trivial and implicit, connection between any thought one has and any other thought or subsequent action one may take.
Absurdism elevates ‘choice of action’ and thereby action itself to the true test of ethics and morality. Because of its lack of reference to ‘authority’ outside oneself it thereby also creates the closest thing to ‘freedom’ that a human being can ever possibly have: the freedom to make choices; without being required, or even able, to defer to external authority for reference or license.
With this freedom comes a truly awesome responsibility, which, at least in certain regard, rivals the kind of responsibility usually associated with ‘deity’. Of course, no one is ever really ‘free’, because ‘freedom’ as anything approaching an absolute, makes no sense in any context. But we’re talking of the scope of the possible here; not woolly, obtuse philosophical notions.
So, why, in this cosmos of no meaning and no purpose, should anyone want to live forever, or at least indefinitely?
If you want some grand reason: sorry, no can do. Really. No can do! There never was, isn’t and never will be that reason you’re looking for. Plus a whole lot of others also go out the window with it, because they’re somehow all related to said ‘grand reason’.
By the way, true Absurdism—without hidden ‘grand reason’ agendas; of the kind that seems to creep into the discourse without people apparently noticing it—is a difficult philosophy to live by. We all crave for certainty, at least some of it, in our decision-making processes; would like to know that we’re doing ‘the right thing’. But if we are the ones that ultimately decide what ‘the right thing’ actually is, then that leaves us with none of that certainty. It takes a fairly solid individual to carry that burden.
Still, for an Emortalist, isn’t that the only ultimate position he or she can assume?

[Lazarus Long]

You do realize that through all that you neither answered my question:

So which is it?

Nor addressed the fundamental aspects I raised; ergo your premise

Way I see it, time is the most precious of all widely-available commodities.

is false.

[Mind]

Despite any disagreements with the general philosophy, I would like to thank Till for sharing his work of prose.

Perhaps debate on the topic could be moved elsewhere (philosophy), as it is interesting.

(post edit: doh! I didn't realize it was already in the Philosophy forum....perhaps another thread for the debate)

[Brainbox]

Despite any disagreements with the general philosophy, I would like to thank Till for sharing his work of prose.

Perhaps debate on the topic could be moved elsewhere (philosophy), as it is interesting.

I'm wholeheartedly agreeing with this. Nothing wrong at all with lateral viewpoints on lateral viewpoints.

[Lazarus Long]

Despite any disagreements with the general philosophy, I would like to thank Till for sharing his work of prose.

I second this too and will add that Till is an old member that has returned after a long absence. He was missed and is always welcome. I did already comment to him privately about this for the record. I must be careful of being too much the ogre.

Our disagreements are academic and have never been personal. I am very glad he has returned because regardless of disagreement, our dialectic has always been constructive and his contributions astute. I guess I just returned to our relationship of old and thank you for reminding me to mind my manners Mind, such social courtesy is very important too.

[till]

Despite any disagreements with the general philosophy, I would like to thank Till for sharing his work of prose.

I second this too and will add that Till is an old member that has returned after a long absence. He was missed and is always welcome. I did already comment to him privately about this for the record. I must be careful of being too much the ogre.

Our disagreements are academic and have never been personal. I am very glad he has returned because regardless of disagreement, our dialectic has always been constructive and his contributions astute. I guess I just returned to our relationship of old and thank you for reminding me to mind my manners Mind, such social courtesy is very important too.

Thanks, Laz. I'll just continue on my merry way then, and post the next part of what Brainbox called a 'lateral viewpoint'.

Life, Death and Nobility

One of the silliest notions to emerge from the deathist camp—exemplified by Leon Kass and his ilk—is the idea that you have to be mortal to be noble; or, even sillier, that being mortal somehow makes you noble and that taking away mortality takes away any chance for being noble.
At the very least the argument evidences screwy logic. The error committed here is known as ‘denying the antecedent’:
If P, then Q.
Not P.
Therefore, not Q.
If mortal, then noble (possibly).
Not mortal.
Therefore not noble (not even possibly).
The assertion here is of course, stronger than outline above suggests. The first line actually should read: If, and only if, P, then Q. Meaning that Q proves P.
Clearly that’s an entirely a priori assertion, which itself can never be proved. So, if Kass and his ilk advance this or a related argument, one always needs to keep in mind that everything stands and falls with the definition of ‘nobility’. They are also prone to pointing out—along the lines of John 15:13: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”—that this is probably the ultimate evidence of the ennobling aspects of mortality.
And, let’s face it, there’s some truth in this. For what greater sacrifice can one bring for others than that of one’s life? Or as the character ‘Sebastian’ in the TV series Babylon 5, another one of the ‘great’ stories of modern times, says: “How do you know the chosen ones. No greater love hath a man, than he lay down his life for his brother. Not for millions, not for glory, not for fame... For one person. In the dark, where no one will ever know or see.” Indeed, indeed. And if one loves life and if there’s no great reward for doing this in the afterlife, if there’s not even the consolation of being remembered as a good and noble person because nobody knows what one has done, then the sacrifice and the love expressed by such a sacrifice surely must rank among the noblest sentiments a human being could ever be capable of.
But this death, this sacrifice, was chosen! Meaning that bringing this kind of thing up in the context of nobility-and-mortality arguments is completely nonsensical. If anyone, and especially someone who claims to be ‘intelligent’, brings it up, two conclusions may be drawn: either he is actually not all that intelligent, or he is deliberately trying to mislead and deceive. I leave it to you to decide which is which in each instance you might come across.
On the other hand, it’s just possible that it is true that given the right circumstances, anybody can be made to believe anything.
The other reason why the nobility-and-mortality argument outlined above doesn’t fly is that, let’s face it, the vast majority of people never get to sacrifice their lives for anything or anyone. The kind of nobility bestowed by ‘sacrifice’ is exceptional, and not everyone is exceptional by definition! Most of us die pathetically; the deaths meaningless and devoid of nobility, doing nobody any good, excepting maybe ‘evolution’; and, as I’m going to point out in another part of this book, evolution isn’t necessarily benign.
And last, and most of all, the pro-death argument fails, because a life is sacrificed much easier and less ‘nobly’, if one thinks that there’s something ‘after’ it. This is why I never bought into the Christian story about Jesus and his sacrifices and resurrection and all that jazz. Even assuming that the story is anything but apocryphal… So they tortured him? Big deal. What’s a few days of pain when you’ll be ‘saved’ for the trouble and richly rewarded for all eternity, Amen? Especially if you have delusions of grandeur and think that your death is somehow special and will ‘save’ the human race. From what? I’ve yet to figure that one out, because if you follow that reasoning further, the whole story makes less sense than a really, really bad movie plot. That this one turned out to be a blockbuster surely tells us something about the sad state of human intelligence, which is in grave need of a few tweaks here and there.
I know, some people will argue that the story of Jesus is really about ‘faith’. That’s cool, too. But it’s easy to have faith in that which cannot be disproved or subjected to ‘reality checks’. The vast majority of people do it on a regular basis; at all levels, not just relating to the usual religious stuff. The human brain has an easier time believing the un-disprovable than it has living with doubt.


Evolution and Nature


I’m indebted to Nick Bostrom for helping me to sort out something in my mind that’s been lurking there un-sorted. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of it, but sometimes you need someone to kind of wrap things up in-summary in such a way as to elicit an “Aha!” kind of reaction. In this instance it’s about the whole ‘nature’ and ‘evolution’ thing.
If I tried to sum up how I see the ‘evolution’ thing in a few points, it might look like this:

(1) Evolution needs death. Without death there’s no ‘evolution’, only ‘change’.
(2) Evolution is never ‘design’, not even indirectly. It’s not that the watchmaker is blind: there is no watchmaker.
(3) The results of evolution are kluged-together structures that just happen to ‘work’; few of them optimally.
(4) Evolution is very inefficient in its use of time and resources.
(5) Evolution isn’t even a ‘process’ per se, but is just a label tacked onto a whole complex of interacting physical laws and structures, resulting almost entirely from a combination of random contingency and conditions that in turn are the results of whatever went before; and which might well have been entirely different.

Despite all this, somehow evolution resulted in the current existence of physical/functional structures we call ‘human beings’. These creatures are capable something called ‘intentionality’, a fascinating attribute that defies precise definition; just like many other ‘mental’ properties. Human beings are also capable of investigating the systematicities of the physical universe, long-term planning and ‘design’. This results in an activity known as ‘engineering’.
Engineering is profoundly different from the evolutionary process in that it is not random, and in that the variables involved in design, development and production can all, at least in principle, laid bare for inspection.
I know, engineering sometimes doesn’t produce very effective results; and when it comes to biology, its complexities are daunting. But it is, together with investigative science, a triumph by any standards, and it is certainly less wasteful than evolution.
Those who would argue otherwise, who would say that it’s unnatural and produces a lot of destructive results, I would say this:
(1) Nobody says the process if perfect. Also, it is a process practice by creatures who are themselves the imperfect results of an very long chain of kluges. So give us a break, will you!
(2) If there’s one thing evolutionary science has discovered beyond any point of argument, it is that ‘evolution’ as a process has been consistently and, one might say ‘terrifyingly’, destructive of its products. Whatever we have may have wrought with our imperfections fades into pathetic insignificance when compared to the indifferent destructiveness of ‘natural’ processes such as ‘evolution’.
Those opposed to the Emortalist project often cite ‘the end of evolution’ as a reason not to embark on it. I used to consider the argument at least moderately cogent. Now I realize just how silly it is.
The silliest aspect is the notion that we can trust ‘nature’ and/or ‘evolution’ to do what is necessary and, in a way, ‘right’ for us as human beings. Trust that whatever it comes up with is going to be the best thing that could happen, and certainly better than what our own paltry efforts at anticipating, designing, planning, engineering would lead us to.
Well, people, the truth is that there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that this is so. Indeed, it is utterly witless to suggest it. It’s worse, in many ways, than your average monotheist religious reasoning. Why? Because at least that kind of religion places all natural ‘intentionality’ into the hands of some ‘higher’, usually extra-universal, authority. Those who attribute ‘intentionality’ to a universe in which the only known intentionality found in human beings and not in some ‘natural process’ like evolution, commit a far graver error of judgment.
Evolution has nothing to offer to human beings. Indications are, as recent mathematical analyses of the distribution and movement of the Human Genome reveal, that the contrary may indeed be true. We should consider ourselves lucky that evolution has gotten us to this point at all. There is not a shred of evidence, direct or circumstantial—nor is there any law of logic—suggesting that its influence on our future will be benign, or beneficial to the survival of, or what you might call ‘positive’ for the development of, the human species.
The cessation of the usual haphazard evolutionary processes through whatever means we care to dream up is therefore not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, once we get over our infatuation with the ‘natural’—a concept about as nebulous and imprecise as you can get!—we’ll soon realize that we can probably do much better, despite our imperfections. And, yes, I know it’s dangerous, as such things are—but no more dangerous that letting evolution have its continued way with us.
The one main reason for our laissez-faire attitude toward evolution is low self-esteem with regards to ourselves as human beings. I know this runs contrary to the trend that attributes to us excessive hubris, but this just isn’t so. By and large we think little of ourselves; even those whom we would normally attribute hubris to: scientists and technologists in particular. Religious belief of all kinds—a major indicator of low ‘humanist’ self-esteem—is rampant among scientists just like everywhere else. Though it is used in the context of the major Western religions as an apparent means to bolster our significance, it really does just the opposite. This kind of reasoning and behavior is just a variant of a weak-willed loser attaching himself as a follower to some alpha-male gang leader, thereby thinking to increase his own importance through association. Followers have a tendency to emulate their leaders—much as they may secretly despise them for being ever-present evidence of their own weakness—and, by aping what they consider their leaders’ attributes and ways of behaving, attempt to be ‘like them’ by proxy. That doesn’t mean they have a high self-esteem. It just means that they have no power of their own.
These unedifying aspects of human nature are just as much a product of ‘evolution’ as those we tend to hold in high esteem. And is that really any reason to ‘trust evolution’ to work to improve our species?
Of course, what is ‘improvement’? If nothing is of intrinsic value, then the human species has just as little ‘value’ to anything at all, as little ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ as…oh, say, roaches.
So why bother?
Because we choose it to be so.
That’s all. And in a similar vein we ought to choose to kiss evolution good-bye and get on with getting as much ‘value’ as we can out of our species.
Or maybe ‘getting’ is the wrong word. ‘Creating’ is much more to the point.

[John_Venturevill...]

Hello Till,

I just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading the chapter focusing on your childhood. My own experience regarding "waking up" to the possibilities of extreme longevity was around age ten when I was reading a children's Bible story about how at one time humans lived for many centuries. I walked over to my mother and asked, "wouldn't it be great if people still lived that long?" And she readily agreed. I enjoyed your tale of devouring Perry Rhodan features as a youth and how the authors actually addressed the matter of the hero living through so many near countless adventures, and the answer was anti-aging medicine!

The equivalent reading material for me was the Professor Jameson science fiction series, written by Neil R. Jones during the 30's, 40's and 50's. The main character, Professor Jameson, has himself cryonically preserved upon his death and then shot into space to orbit the Earth in a capsule. Alien cyborgs came along who restored his brain to life and put it inside one of their robot shell bodies. He joined the aliens and went on many exciting adventures as they explored the universe together. These books gave a sense of immense passages of time passing by, and a mission might easily take centuries, if not millennia, to complete. Robert Ettinger read this series and considered it one of the inspirations that lead to him to help get cryonics established.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_R._Jones

http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/jameson.html

I never had a bad experience as a child similar to yours where I suddenly was agonizingly aware of my impending death and was badly shaken by it. But I did nearly drown around age twelve and only a slender protruding vine that I caught in the nick of time saved my life. It was that experience that gave me the realization that one moment of bad judgement in the wilderness, riding a bike, talking to a violent person, etc., could result in my death.

I look forward to finishing your book!

John Grigg

[till]

Hey, John, thanks for that!

I also missed either death or at the very least serious injury at least twice that I know of, and it may have been thrice, but about that I'm not sure. Plus I not only survived diphtheria when I was a child but apparently suffered no ill after effects, which apparently is very rare. So, somehow, life seems to kinda like me, which is nice. And it makes one cautious. My sports, in so far as I have involved myself in them were always 'safe' activities, though you wouldn't believe it when you look at my record; like fencing, some jujitsu and Samurai swordcraft. But these activities teach one such skills as coordination, dexterity, awareness and so on, and those are survival skills. But try to get me to ski or do other things that involve highly dangerous things at risky speeds or suchlike, and thanks, but no, thanks! Life's too precious to waste it on pointless exposure to danger. If one has to risk it, then let it be for something worthwhile. If one has to die, let that death count for something; not just be some pointless snuffing-out.

Continuing the narrative in the next installment...

Thanks again for your comments.
Till

[till]

Loss

The longer you live, the more people around you will die. This isn’t just ‘opinion’ but irrefutable fact. The only thing that could invalidate this fact would be the introduction of absolute immortality for everyone of the set of ‘people around you’. Period.
Apart from death, which is a definite and terminal ‘loss’, there are other ways in which people will disappear from your life. For example, there’s the whole issue of the “until death do us part” affirmation, which I’ll talk about in another section. People will be ‘lost’ for you for many reasons, of which death is just the most final one. I’ve ‘lost’ contact with people, who might or might not be dead by now, but I can’t tell, because I don’t even know how to find them, though in a few instances I tried several times. For all practical purposes these people are ‘lost’ to me, and in some instances I regret this very much. But if, like us, you’ve moved around the world a lot, this kind of thing happens, no matter how hard you try not to let it.
In this section I want to focus on the loss of people due to death.
People distant and close to you will die, the longer you’re around for. They may die because they haven’t got an option—shit happens!—or because they choose to die. Some of these people may be very close to you.
This so far this isn’t all that different from ordinary life. I my lifetime I’ve lost a number of people to death, and with some of them it still leaves me with a big empty space where they used to be whenever I think about them. But they’re gone, some of them for quite a long time, and while time doesn’t heal all wounds, it kind of papers them over—most of the time.
Emortals will be faced with loss again and again. As such they will have to develop mechanism to cope with such events. One of those mechanisms is detachment.
Detachment is very effective. It’s not that one doesn’t care about what happened, but the grief is dulled and dealt with by what amounts to standing back mentally and emotionally, and basically telling oneself what I said above: “This is going to happen again and again and again; so learn to live with it.” It’s a way of gaining ‘perspective’; of removing oneself from being in a situation to standing outside it. It’s a technique that comes in useful in many situations. Indeed, one might argue that the world would be a better place if people practiced more ‘perspective getting’. I’m inclined to agree.
Detachment is an essential part of Buddhist teaching. The practitioner is admonished to practice it in order to alleviate suffering, which, Buddhists rightly observe, comes from a lack of detachment. Dealing with suffering is central to Buddhism, and who could argue with it? Emortals would make good Buddhists from that point of view, because adopting the ‘detachment’ option is surely the best way to deal with the endless string of grief we’re likely to face. Develop a serenity that helps one through these dark moments.
Or so one would think.
I don’t.
I used to, but I don’t anymore.
The ‘detachment’ method of coping with loss, while effective in my own experience, is probably the most insidiously dangerous choice to make. It’s all right, if you’re a 70-odd year mortal, or even a 150-odd year mortal. Chances are that you’re going to be hit by a cause for grief at some stage, and, let’s face it, bad things like the loss of a beloved spouse can actually kill people and do so on a regular basis. Learning to stand back can save your life, and also help those around you; like maybe your kids, who really need you functioning and not be some nervous wreck. So, yes, the technique can yield significant benefits and probably will. There probably won’t be any time for it to become so habitual that you soon lose any ability to remain in the situation and to experience grief. And grief isn’t a bad thing; it just becomes that way when it becomes chronic.
But things are different when you’re emortal. The danger of creating rutted mind-tracks increases with every year of your life. This doesn’t just happen to ‘old people’ whose bodies and brains are falling apart. It happens because of the way the nervous system is built up, as well as basic human psychology; and that’s not going to be changed a lot merely by living a long time. As we get older, ways of automatically dealing with specific stimuli or situations tend to establish themselves as ever harder-to-remove patterns of thought and behavior. If left unchecked and unexamined, the individual concerned won’t even be able to know anymore what kind of a sclerotic, rutted person he or she has become.
This kind of thing expresses itself in a rather subtle and insidious manner in the way a person exhibits a tendency to give more answers than asking questions when getting older. Many of these answers usually will not change much for, say, the second half of the average human life. Every answer that doesn’t change is a ‘rut’ of sorts. Of course, you need some answers for coping with the exigencies of daily life and whatever it throws at you, but even here it’s not always beneficial to leave responses to stimuli unexamined, especially if they produce non-beneficial results.
Detachment as a ‘rut’ is dehumanizing. That doesn’t invalidate its utility, nor does it belittle Buddhist philosophy. It’s just that it’s such an easy way out of having to deal with loss that it’s likely to become an irreversible habit. It will eventually stunt any recognizable human emotional response. As a result, the person affected will either become an organic automaton—just about the worst kind of creature springing from the ranting of the likes of Leon Kass—or, alternatively, seek emotional stimulation from sources that could range from the merely strange to the horrifically deviant. It already happens occasionally, usually with people who have a screwed-up brain chemistry. With Emortals it could become commonplace, as a result of over-practice.
In the end, everything that’s likely to create uncontrolled or contingent emotional pain—meaning un-planned pain that comes about because ‘shit happens!’ rather than as the result of some intentional action—will eventually be dealt with in the same way.
I suppose, the ‘rationalists’ of the world—meaning those who believe that a human being can in principle be mostly rational, with emotion manipulated and/or controlled by ‘reason’—will rejoice at the prospect of achieving their long dreamed-of goals. But it’s not that simple, except maybe for rationalists. And actually it isn’t simple even for them; they just have the answers, and aren’t pained by vexing questions anymore—questions that might be prompted if they were forced to face the raw nature of their ‘emotional’ side.
The idea of a future of detached, serene people horrifies me more than, I suspect, it horrifies even your average anti-immortalist. That’s because I’m a story-teller; a writer of fiction that deals not so much with ideas but with people and their emotions and motivations. And I am very emotional about a great many things; only with the likes of me I suppose you’d call it ‘passionate’. Passion about what one does. Passion about the people one loves. Passion for the future. Passion for living. Passion for being human.
Passion is an emotional thing. ‘Rational passion’ is an oxymoron.
As for how to best deal with loss and its pain, if not with detachment and perspective, once again I’d like to point to stories that deal with the subject; for stories, imaginative narratives, is all we have to guide us in that area. Probably the most relevant is one written by that great, and sadly long-dead, libertarian and immortalist, Robert A. Heinlein: Time Enough For Love.
There is much ‘loss’ in TEFL, but probably the most poignant is the one of ‘Dora’; a loss that, even after millennia, has not been forgotten and been ‘with’ the protagonist throughout his long life. Indeed, it could be argued that one of the unspoken reasons as to why, after 2500 years, he wants to call it quits, is that he thinks that, no matter how long he lives, Dora can never be ‘replaced’; in his thoughts, in is feelings, in what she meant to him and continues to mean. Doesn’t mean he obsesses with her; it’s just that she was, is and remains an irreplaceable, incomparable, immeasurable ‘significance’.
The answer provided by TEFL is simple; superficially paradoxical, and yet the only answer possible for someone who accepts the inherently absurd and idiosyncratic nature of what it is to be human.
Accept the loss. Do not deny it or its reality or gravity; its dismal and grievous terrible-ness; the great black void it leaves behind in life: yours and the world’s. Though the lost one can never be replaced, and though it doesn’t make a smidgen of difference to that person anymore, honoring them and their memory and what they were, might at least make a difference to those still living.
Above all: stay alive—so that you can remember.
For if you die, then even the memory of what that person was, if only in their significance to you, is gone; and the one you lost will have joined the forgotten billions of forever-lost lives.
I know, the cosmos doesn’t give a damn. It’s can’t give a damn—about memory and meaning and all that kind of thing. But we can if we choose to do so.
With the memory we need to accept the joy and the sadness. The joy of once having had the privilege of having the lost one as part of our lives. The sadness of them not being here anymore.
Survival—far from being a betrayal of the now-dead lost one, as many would no doubt think of it—is the only way in which we can honor them and allow something of them to continue existing. Survival doesn’t have to be just for ourselves.
Detachment will kill the memory and the significance of the one who is gone and thus completely obliterate them. Only acceptance of the loss and the pain can avoid that.
And, yes, life will go on. And there will indeed be others who will assume equal significance to the lost one—not to ‘replace’ them, but to assume ‘a’ place in one’s life that holds comparable importance. But they will appear when it is time for them to appear. As long as there’s time enough.
It’s a tough call, and it presents us with an apparent irresolvable emotional dilemma: how to be completely and utterly engaged with and devoted to our loved one, and yet know that one day we will lose them—unless we go first, of course. But, as a character in the movie Shadowlands put it: “Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”
That’s the deal.

Till Death Do Us Part

In the 1943 movie adaptation of the tale of Baron Münchhausen, the outrageous tales are told by an apparent descendant of the legendary ‘Baron’; who in the end turns out to be the Baron himself, given immortality by a sorcerer some 200 years before. Kind oft of a Wandering Jew, but without the immortality being a curse. After all the stories were told, the Baron reveals his true identity to the woman he loves and ‘returns’ the gift he had been given, because, as he said to the woman: “You I love.”.
The basic moral of that aspect of the story is that immortality and love are somehow incompatible, and that once you love someone, you’ll really not want to survive them by much, because they’re the love of your life and all that, and what’s the point of living if you can’t be with them?
When people get married, at least in the Western world, they by and large do this under the assumption of an expectable maximum Till-‘Death-Do-Us-Part’ (DDUP) time of, say, 50 years; maybe 60, if you strike it lucky and get married early. The commitment to the other person—nowadays often called a ‘partner’—is of strictly finite duration. After the first rush of feeling-good has worn off and life’s practicalities rise in importance and eclipse it, this finite togetherness with someone else usually still looks manageable. Oddly enough, the fact that this commitment is for the ‘rest of your life’—for males more so than for females, since the latter tend to live longer—doesn’t seem to come into the rationalization process as much as the factor of the time-span manageability; like “Can I live with this person for this long? Do I have enough love/affection for or connection to this person to live with him/her for that kind of time?”
In real life a lot of people answer “no”; maybe not immediately, but well before the DDUP point. In which case ‘DDUP’ becomes an acronym for ‘Divorce-Do-Us-Part’. And that’s with everybody still considering themselves mortal!
With Emortalism, waiting until the ‘death’ version of DDUP-day could take a very long time; a very, very long time. Even the greatest love will have seriously trying times surviving to that point. That’s because ‘love’ is, after all, a complex of emotions, whose main utility lies in establishing and maintaining pair-bonding for the usual biological purposes. That it turns out to look like ‘more’ than that is incidental. Nature and evolution don’t ‘design’ things like engineers; it’s all about what ‘works’ and what doesn’t, and what effect it has on species propagation. ‘Love’ is one of those things that does indeed ‘work’, at least in a sufficient majority of instances for it to remain a feature of the human psyche. It’s probably overkill, at least if we consider the purely utilitarian aspect of it. But it’s one of those things that is just so wonderful that one doesn’t mind the overkill. With the ‘wonderfulness’ of it also come, as these things tend to work, equally severe ‘scariness’ aspects.
But ‘love’ and its milder-natured psychological relatives definitely aren’t designed to cope with centuries and millennia of extended human life spans. And the likelihood that the first ‘D’ in DDUP will mean ‘Divorce’ is going to be close to certainty. That doesn’t devalue the relationship that exists at a time when ‘love’ is strong enough to make the likelihood of severing of the relationship almost non-existent. But things end, and while it isn’t certain that a given pair-bond-relationship of the traditional kind will end before one of the emortal participants dies, it’s still extremely likely in the vast majority of cases. “I’ll love you forever,” will change its meaning once ‘forever’ doesn’t imply a death, but actually means ‘1000+ years’.
Emortal societies will have to adapt to this new situation; and adapt they will. Robert Heinlein’s protagonist, Lazarus Long, from Time Enough For Love, as well as the society he belongs to, exemplify such a state of affairs. The definition of what constitutes a ‘romantic relationship’ will undergo inevitable change.
So far, this is all pretty obvious, I’d say. Most of those who have thought about a future with Emortals in it, would have come to similar conclusions.
But this isn’t the whole story, and it stops short of considering what’s really likely to happen in the interim—between now and when everybody is, or at least some of us are, emortal.
The issue is that there will be an inevitable division between Emortals and those who aren’t (let’s call them ‘Ephemerals’). This is a matter of practicality. It isn’t going to be something that’s done to everybody at the same time, for any number of reasons. Even within a nation capable of delivering an Emortality treatment to all of those citizens who need and want it, it’s not going to happen. That’s mainly because there will be those who, for a number of reasons, are going to refuse it. Said reasons may include everything from disbelief in the treatment to ethical/moral/religious objections.
There is no doubt in my mind that when this thing finally comes down, society will be split along a divide that’s far deeper and more profound than something trivial like, just to pick a random example, the liberal-conservative chasm existing in American society today. And you can see how deep that one is! Yet it will pale into insignificance in comparison with what is heading our way.
The situation across nations will even be more severe and virtually unbridgeable. On one side of the divide will be those whose lives will continue to be ephemeral and who believe in the ‘death’ version of DDUP. On the other side will be Emortals who simply cannot look at things in that way anymore. Not forever anyway. Many of them might, from old habits of thinking and social conditioning, continue to think of their spouses in the same way as they used to, for a while at least. But even they will know, deep down, that things aren’t as they used to be. Just how long they’ll be able to live in denial, will depend on their psychological makeup. One thing’s for certain though: people will ultimately change and adapt to the new conditions. Whatever they change into is a different question altogether; one that doesn’t have a simple or single answer.
You have to consider the real reasons why many couples stay together, and why it’s considered socially unacceptable to walk out on one’s spouse. One of these is that the social fabric of many societies is built around ‘family’, nuclear and/or extended. The destruction of family is therefore closely associated with the destruction of social fabric. Religion also comes into this, of course; but then again, religion is part of ‘social fabric’.
But on a personal level there’s a much more significant reason, that adds to the others, and it is this: commitment. In an Ephemeral’s life, being in a relationship is an investment in commitment. You go down the path of life together, and it gets to the point where your biological clock is ticking down, especially for women. Being deserted by a spouse gets worse the later in life it happens, because the chances of finding another with whom one can connect in a similar way is low. It can and does happen, but it isn’t common. The resentment created by desertion is, in no small part, encapsulated in the phrase “I gave him/her the best years of my life, and now look what s/he has done to me!”
Yes, people do love each other, and there are many families where ‘love’, in whatever transmuted form from the initial ‘romance’, is the true bonding element. But I also think that the pretense of love, where in truth there is a whole complex of other factors in the game, is a major element in holding most human relationships together. Look around for the signs, among relatives, friends, acquaintances, or just plain strangers. They are much more numerous than you’d want to believe.
There are also bonds forged by familiarity and fondness created by long-term association. All of those are also real and indeed effective, and in many cases supplant the initial pair-bonding heat, or act as a support for whatever that has transmuted into.
But lots of couples separate and/or divorce. This is a reality. Fact is that maintaining ‘love’, in a form that’s recognizable as ‘love’, is not easy; and most people are just too damn lazy to work on it, or too selfish/self-centered/self-involved/uniopic to be capable of sustaining it.
“I gave him/her the best years of my life, and now look what s/he has done!”…
That particular accusation makes no sense for an Emortal. The best years of one’s life may be yet to come; and indeed there’s every chance that they are!
Actually, I can see that Emortalism may catch on in many Ephemerals as a consequence of being deserted by one’s spouse/lover/partner. What better way of having the last laugh or the last word, or of defying the odds and turning what’s been a dastardly deed committed on oneself by another, into a potential triumph?
And now, imagine that you’re living in a society—and a world—populated by Emortals and Ephemerals, living side by side. Imagine this everyday world around you as it might be; where that emortal woman sitting over there in the commuter train has just dissolved her contract with her emortal spouse, while the Ephemeral sitting beside her still believes that her marriage is sanctioned and ordained by God and can only end with the death of one of the partners. Imagine what it’ll be like to—at least for a while, maybe a decade, maybe a century, maybe longer—in which you can’t know just how deep the gulf is between yourself and the stranger sitting right beside you.
Which leads me into the next topic.

[Shannon Vyff]

I was reminded of the Immortalist Mannifesto for some reason: http://www.immortalism.com/

Till--great avatar art! I hope to see you around at ImmInst for a long time, your views are very much in line with others here, and you bring up some great points for discussion

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