RE: Morgan Freeman on Morning Joe just now.
June 6, 2012 at 2:48 pm
(This post was last modified: June 6, 2012 at 3:02 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(June 6, 2012 at 7:54 am)Brian37 Wrote: But he did postulate some woo that did give me a lip twitch. To the question of "can we live forever" and he said "maybe".
No I think that is going to far in a couple of respects. EVEN if WE get to the point of being able to replicate organs to the point of replacing them, atoms still have a shelf life. And has anyone ever tried fixing the same damned thing over and over. No matter how many times your fix the same thing, it still wears out over time.
BUT EVEN IF, you still have disease and violence not to mention the planet will die, so no, nothing lasts forever. I can see us evolving and creating medical technology to extend our lifespans, yes. But no, there will never be a "forever" for life or any object in the universe.
Really? If conservation of energy is valid, is energy not forever? If indestructability of information, a corner stone of physics even the great Steven Hawkin rued challenging, is as valid as we think, then is not information also forever?
Does a particular menifestation of energy in the form of an atom necessarily have a shelf life? I believe all experiments to verify the predicted natural decay of protons have so far came up completely empty. We seem to have no reason to believe stable isotops have a finite life span.
Why is what defines who we are necessarily and inextricably tied to our bioilogical body, to our planet, or sun, or even what we might colloquially term our universe?
If we are the personalities and memories that defines us, who is to say this can not be transfered to a different device than our biological brain, and who is to say this could not be stored as data and replicated somewhere else, in a different body, on a different planet, around a different star, in something different from what we might colloquially term "our universe"?
So why in principle can an entity governed by something that started out as a human's current personality and current memories not go on without any definite end?
(June 6, 2012 at 12:05 pm)Tempus Wrote: Very true. Even if biological immortality could be achieved for humans, that still wouldn't necessarily make us invulnerable. Our bodies could still be destroyed, would still need to be fed, etc. Not to mention other side effects - what happens to memory when you're 2000 years old? Presumably the brain only has so much capacity. That being said, if we'd reached a stage where biologically immortally were possible, I guess one could suggest that maybe these problems wouldn't be quite the problems they are now. Perhaps we'd find ways to expand our memory capacity, for example. And the inconvenient problem of the end of the universe
Why can't what started out as your brain be cybornically enhanced to be able to store and rapidly retrieve 2,000 years of memory, or 2,000,000,000 years of memory?
If the particular mechanisms (say your body and brain) which currently supports the thoughts and memories and personalities can be destroyed, why can't what defines your thought and memories and personalities not be backed up as data and restored to allow everything that defines you to continue past that that unfortumate destruction?
If the universe indeed ends, but if universe did originate as a quantum flucturation, who is to say it would be impossible for us to generate another such quantum flucturation, and tune its initial condition such that the information that defines us gets transmitted to the new universe, and new copy of us will arise in the new universe, allowing us to survive even the end of our own universe?
I think there is nothing in principle that would stop us living a overwhelmingly long period of time, only an nasty amount of technical, and therefore overcomeable, hurdles stand in the way.
