What is immortality?

Markel Kori

Before we begin: This post marks the start of a series of articles introducing Immortalism. I have reposted them from my website, https://humanitytomorrow.site/.

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Becoming immortal overnight is not something that can happen. Depending on how one defines words like "life" and "death," it may take different amounts of time, or may even be impossible altogether.

That is why, for now, by immortality I mean the first steps in that direction: life extension and rejuvenation. That already sounds less frightening, does it not? For those who are wary of grand words, these more familiar terms will do just fine.

But there is no need to worry that immortality somehow "sounds wrong" either. Death is something we ought to fight; there is nothing good in death. A world without death is a far better world than the one we have now. And since the opposite of death is its absence, that is, immortality, that is what we should strive for.

I want to define the scope of this FAQ: it will concern people who do not age, who have no upper limit on lifespan, but whose average lifespan is more than a thousand years.

I introduce these limits because:

a) If throughout life the human risk of death remained roughly at the level it is at age thirty, then on average we really would live about 1,000 years. This is a rough estimate, but it works for the purposes of our discussion.

b) The absolute elimination of death, unlike the idea of radical life extension, belongs at the present stage of humanity more to philosophy. Discussing it would provoke even more questions and outrage, so let us postpone that for another time.

(That said, I do of course support the complete elimination of death as the ultimate culmination of life extension, but it really is too separate a question, and I would like to examine it from another angle in another article.)

Whenever in this chain of statements I speak of immortality and the struggle against death, you may take it to mean efforts in life extension, rejuvenation, the fight against diseases, especially age-associated ones, the development of regenerative medicine, and other neighboring fields that could allow a person to be healthier and live longer.

Unfortunately, our world has developed a powerful "culture of death," or deathism, as some call it. We justify death and even exalt it, because for almost all of human history we simply had no other choice. Yet now many outstanding scientists have no doubt that rejuvenation and life extension are goals genuinely achievable through scientific and technological progress.

Allow me to quote one of the greatest physicists of the twenty-first century, Richard Feynman:

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable, and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that that terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured. ^[1]

--Richard Feynman

Over the past decades, scientists have become fully convinced that aging and death are not fundamental laws of the universe, nor magic, but simply specific processes in the organism that can often be slowed or even reversed.

Scientists have already extended the lifespan of nematodes^[2] and yeast ^[3] tenfold, fruit flies by ~2.5 to ~3.5 times ^[4], and mice by ~1.7 times ^[5].

Unfortunately, research into life extension in humans is still in its infancy. Many factors affect this, and I will discuss them in other articles. Who knows, perhaps if not for deathism and distrust, we would already have achieved far greater results.

For this reason I have compiled an extensive FAQ on common misconceptions, myths, and questions related to immortality, rejuvenation, and life extension. I will try not to linger too long on each point, because there truly are many of them.

Although in this sequences I will often be refuting entrenched positions, in truth many of them do not even need refuting. Even if some of these misconceptions were the purest truth, immortality would still be a good.

To see this, I suggest using the reversal test developed by Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord.

Imagine that aging is already gone. People are forever young and live for thousands of years, dying only from accidents or by their own choice. No one even remembers what aging is anymore.

But then some problem arises. Let us say civilization truly begins to struggle because of overpopulation, growing inequality, or some other cause.

Then a mad scientist comes to you and says he has invented a unique virus that spreads extremely well and will very quickly infect everyone on the planet. This virus will begin slowly destroying people's bodies, eventually leading to weakness, chronic pain, deterioration of all bodily systems, and an increased risk of most diseases and injuries. Year by year a person grows more hideous, begins to forget loved ones, and in the end loses their mind and dies in a vegetative state.

Absolutely everyone, including you, your parents, your partner, your friends, everyone alive now who has the potential to live for thousands of years, will contract this virus and suffer from it until they burn out over the course of some decades, meaning their expected lifespan will be cut by dozens of times. But it would solve your problem of overpopulation, resource scarcity, inequality, an eternal dictator, or whatever other problem you chose.

Would you agree?

Is that the most rational solution to such problems? Does the end justify the means? Would you allow billions of living beings to die in order to solve some problem?

Is suffering caused by the gradual degradation of the body, and its final destruction as a result, really the optimal solution to any of the problems that might arise from life extension?

Or indeed to any problem that might exist at all?

Think about this. Human beings have a cognitive bias toward preserving the status quo, that is, the current state of affairs, even when change might make things better.

Many people, for various reasons, most often irrational ones, want to keep everything as it is, to leave aging and death exactly as they are. They search for justifications. But if you imagine a world without aging, you will understand that no reason could possibly justify aging and the premature death it brings upon a human being.

In next articles I will examine the most common objections, showing that most of them are wholly or partly mistaken. But even if some or all of them turned out to be correct, the Reversal Test shows that, morally speaking, none of these possible difficulties could justify refusing to research life extension.

What is radical life extension?

To date, the human lifespan record has not exceeded 123 years. By around age 100, changes in the body significantly reduce a person’s ability to survive, and the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. These observations suggest that maximum lifespan is fixed and subject to natural limits.

In addition, over the past 20 years, developed countries have seen a sharp slowdown in the rate of increase in average life expectancy, indicating that modern medical technologies and other measures for maintaining the body’s viability may be approaching their limits.

Radical life extension is not about overcoming the known limits of lifespan, nor about increasing life expectancy by 0.3 years for every year lived. It is the possibility of fully restoring the body’s viability to an ideal norm, completely restoring structure and function, and resetting the biological clock.

An intermediate stage on the path to radical life extension is LEV, or longevity escape velocity. This is a situation in which the increasing complexity of maintaining the body’s viability, which grows with each passing year, is fully compensated by the development of technologies used to preserve life.

I think you put a great question here - what is immortality - but there is a trap:
We try to spend a lot of time to persuade laymen that life extension is good. Most of them will never come here top read it and most who will read are already believers.

But may be instead we should look in the nature of immortality? Is it possible to imagine a mind which lives infinitly long life?

One can argue that in that case such mind will have extremely large memory, galactic sized, and retrieval time from it will be millions of years which would eventually slow down the thinking process it self. In the limits such mind would stop which is equal to death.

Or if the mind is finite, it would eventually enter in the same mind-states, that is looping, - and it is not exact immortality - though there is no death.

What do you think?

Glad to see this series!

I like that you remove the caricature that immortalism is about “magical immortality” or living at any cost.

In practice, it is about something much clearer: aging, age-related diseases, and premature death should become objects of medicine, rather than remain a fate we are forced to romanticise.

Most objections against solving aging are proper questions, but death is not the optimal solution to any of them. So those problems do not justify preserving aging now either. The reversal test proves this especially strong

What is radical life extension?

Glad to see this series!

I like that you remove the caricature that immortalism is about “magical immortality” or living at any cost.

In practice, it is about something much clearer: aging, age-related diseases, and premature death should become objects of medicine, rather than remain a fate we are forced to romanticise.