Technological Immortality

[AdamLOV]

Why would anyone want to prolong human life? Why go through such a hassle just to avoid something as painless as death? In the view of Epicurus, death is something to be embraced, for it puts an end to suffering and pain. Transhumanism seems like just another way of trying to avoid or sublimate the threatening, but, for better or worse, "unavoidable shipwreck" (Schopenhauer) that nonexistence poses.

If suffering and pain can be mitigated and/or eliminated here, then why not?  That's the entire point of medicine, no?  I mean, if that's really your view, then I guess you don't need those pesky vaccinations, or any kind of life-prolonging upkeep.

I want to live as long as I can because I'm curious.  I want to see if we ever leave the solar system.  I want to see if we ever meet other intelligent life.  I want to see if we can stop from destroying ourselves.  I want to see what passes as popular culture a couple hundred years from now.  Everything from music, to theater, to fashion, to literature, and to all the things which may supplant them.  I want to see Catholicism whither and die as the outdated patriarchy it is.  I want to see the developed countries give a shit about Africa.  I want to see us actually obtain energy independence and an entirely renewable infrastructure.

I can't see most/any of that when I'm dead. 

The fact that you want to see all that in no way implies that others would even want to see the fruition of those possibilities. Thermodynamics does not care about our hopes and desires. This may seem callous, but it is a fact of existence that negentropic living systems are born so as to die. The very callousness of evolution, the fact that it has resulted in unattainable desires, such as those listed by yourself (some, if not all of the utopian goals listed by yourself are unattainable, that much we can admit), would militate against prolonging negentropy. Life, put simply, does not deserve to be prolonged. Medical science has made great strides in eliminating physical pain, and even psychological suffering could one day be eliminated, but it is doubtful that suffering in general could ever be eliminated. Therefore life would, at best, become a condition filled with unbearable boredom. Furthermore, the New-And-Improved humanity's levels of tolerance in relation to suffering would be greatly diminished, and were technology to, horrible dictu, experience a regression, they would find many of the forms of suffering we have grown used to simply intolerable. Relegation of present forms of suffering could therefore have the side-effect of sentencing future generations to even more horrible levels of pain. Perhaps you do not really want to see what technolgical innovation may have in store. That said, suffering should definitely be combatted in any way possible, for example via encouragment of euthanesia for the terminally ill. But we should never forget that life itself is a terminal illness.