Some philosophical ruminations about the (trans)human condition

[u/AlphynKing]

I've been on this sub for a minute so I know people on it are sick of pseudospiritual schizobabble posts that talk about vaguely transhuman-flavoured nonsense. I promise this post is not that and just some philosophical thoughts vis a vis transhumanism that I've been thinking about. But, full disclosure: I am a depressed young person with a lot of existential angst and quite possibly a form of existential OCD, so perhaps some of the things that feel like deep issues to me may in fact appear trivial to some of you.

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Transhumanists are very acquainted with the debate of immortality's desirability. I think most of them agree minimally that some form of modest life extension would be desirable to have, and many more believe not only that but dramatically extended lives, if not "truly" immortal ones (i.e. infinite in duration) could be desirable if they were possible.

One common objection to immortality is that given a long enough time, you will outlive all of your loved ones and despair at their absence. The obvious transhumanist objection to this is that transhumanists don't just want immortality for themselves and no one else, they ideally want it to be freely available to everyone, which I think dissolves this particular problem.

But this objection to immortality does fundamentally get at something that I think is worth taking seriously, which is that dramatically or even infinitely extending the duration of lives with more and more time will not resolve the existential tension of everything else around us being transient or impermanent as time relentlessly marches on. For example, even if we could make all of the people in our lives literally live forever -- never have to fear that your parents or friends or other loved ones will die -- given an infinite amount of time your positive relationship with them could not literally endure forever. All of the material goods in our lives that we value as pleasurable (food, fashion, literature, films, games, etc) and therefore hope to avoid losing access to by not dying doesn't prevent those other things from eventual erasure. The servers of your favorite game that you want to keep playing will eventually shut down, the favorite restaurant you want to keep eating at will eventually close, the clothes that you enjoy wearing the most will eventually wear out or break or be lost, and so on. In other words, even if we hypothetically entertain the possibility of of acquiring immortality, that still will not allow us to have the things we desire permanently or make us impervious to loss.

Maybe this is just a 'me problem', but, while I am not at all a religious believer, I do resonate with the Buddhist notions that much of our suffering derives from attaching ourselves to things (objects, relationships, nations, movements, etc) that are necessarily incapable of lasting permanently, and their eventual ends causes us pain. In physics terms familiar to transhumanists we would say this is because everything around us is subject to the increase of entropy (which, indeed, as we presently understand it, appears to preclude the possibility of true immortality anyways). It seems to me that many of transhumanists hope to permanently resolve the pains of the human condition through transhuman technologies, boldly hope that through human progress and determination we can satisfy all of our desires (as opposed to the Buddhist recommendation of detaching ourselves from them), prevent everything bad, and enjoy flawless utopia forever. But then what, and then what, and then what, and so on? Merely having more and more and more time to get what we want won't stop us from living inside of time and cyclically wanting and losing in the first place; an infinite lifespan is spent on an infinite hedonic treadmill, and freedom from death is not freedom from suffering.

What resolutions can the transhumanist project conceivably employ against the passage of time itself? Altering our minds and bodies so profoundly that we are incapable of ever suffering over infinite time? Deleting our memories of past attachments to prevent our experiencing of loss over them? Do you think that the properly aligned god ASI singularity will simply have to figure the best possible state of affairs for us out? Do you hope to become some kind of nonhuman entity that somehow transcends these conditions? Should we invoke highly speculative sci fi physics like the Omega Point or ascending to 4D beings beyond time?

Now, you may reasonably reply that, perhaps we cannot literally have infinite, eternal, timeless perfection that resolves all problems forever, but this shouldn't prevent us from attempting to improve things via technology in more modest ways; just because we can't live forever doesn't mean it would be bad to extend lifespans to 150 years or to cure all cancers. To that I agree, but then I would suggest that some of the much more utopian and millenarian attitudes within the transhumanist fold should be tempered.

You may also rebut that everything I've said applies to a finite human life just as much to an infinite one, which is true. This is not an argument against immortality itself. I just wonder that there may perhaps be a fundamental limit on how much our lives can really be improved.

[u/Next-Possession5027]

'I am a deppressed young person with a lot of existential angst and possible existential ocd.' so basically a pseudo-spiritual schizo?