Thought Experiment 20: Condemned to Life

8/3/2015

Novel-lengthed treatment of this idea.

I'm a bit scared to share this week's thought experiment as it deals with the exact subject of my next novel. See what you think of this.

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Vitalia had discovered the secret to eternal life. Now she vowed to destroy it. Two hundred years ago, she had been given the formula for an elixir of immortality by a certain Dr Makropulos. Young and foolish, she had prepared and drunk it. Now she cursed her greed for life. Friends, lovers, and relatives had grown old and died, leaving her alone. With no death pursuing her, she lacked all drive and ambition, and all the projects she started seemed pointless. She had grown bored and weary, and now just longed for the grave.
Indeed, the quest for extinction had been the one goal which had given some shape and purpose to her life over the last half century. Now she finally had the antidote to the elixir. She had taken it a few days ago and could feel herself rapidly weakening. All that remained now was for her to make sure that no one else was condemned to life as she had been. The elixir itself had long ago been destroyed. Now, she took the piece of paper that specified the formula and tossed it into the fire. As she watched it burn, for the first time in decades, she smiled.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 58.
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Any thoughts? Would you want to kill yourself too? Or do you think you could be happy living forever?

13 Comments

Mattb link

8/3/2015 10:38:29 am

This thought experiment really hilights the lack of clarity regarding how much of us is natural and automatic and how much is conscious and deliberate. Our conscious mind seems general purpose enough to adapt to an unlimited span of time. Our biological systems, on the other hand, seem like they would degrade into some kind of failure mode. It's just unclear what that failure would look like. I suspect we'd just start forgetting things. Our memories are based on percieved importance, so as our scale of time increases we consider different things memorable. Adults worry about investments and laws rather than pop songs and snacks like kids. Presumably, a super-adult would worry about something even bigger, like species survival or empires. I think a lot hinges on whether or not immortality means magical non-death even if starving or drowning. Assuming it doesn't, one can simply stop eating or walk out into the snow, so one isn't forced to go on living. Personally, I would like nothing more than to be relieved of my expiration date. There would be so much more time to learn and build slowly on a solid foundation. Imagine not being born at the wrong time, because you can just wait a generation to try again.

Mimi Stiegel

8/3/2015 06:16:38 pm

I like Mattb's comment. Simone, your novel (which has been made into a major film?, sounds like "The Green Mile" a bit.

@EdGibney link

8/4/2015 03:06:22 am

Sorry Mimi. This post was confusing. That photo was of Simone de Beauvoir's novel (she's a French existentialist philosopher and writer most famous for writing The Second Sex and being the lifelong partner of Jean-Paul Sartre). All Men Are Mortal is not at all like The Green Mile that I saw on film--it's about a woman who comes across a man totally bored with life and unable to do anything. It turns out though that he is immortal and has given up after really, really trying to change the world for a very long time. All Men Are Mortal tells his tale and her efforts at bringing him "back to life." My next novel is about the topic of immortality for humans, but I'll say more about that on Friday.

Matt link

8/3/2015 07:53:24 pm

Figured out what bothered me. The setup is contradictory. Lack of fear of death would not result in malaise. Pretty much everyone everywhere everywhen has lacked fear of death. The default is to disbelieve you can die, if you even pause to consider the topic. Knowing for a fact you couldn't die would be different in degree, not in kind. An immortal human would be driven by the same soup of short and long term priorities as everyone else. Longing for suicide would only be the result of clinical depression, same as for everyone else. That's the most deeply seated priority of all. They might pursue their own death out of curiosity, but since they couldn't appreciate the discovery, probably not. They might see death as the only solution to pain, like if immortality doesn't make them immune to siphylis and they waste away with no hope of recovery.

@EdGibney link

8/4/2015 03:17:34 am

You make excellent points Matt, that I definitely agree with. I mean, wouldn't a wood chipper solve Vitalia's problem pretty thoroughly? Just to play devil's advocate though, De Beauvoir and others would say that after a thousand years of trying to do stuff, you'd just be condemned to repeating things, which would result in clinical depression and a longing for death. It's another form of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence (though not exactly what he was talking about). Are you sure this wouldn't happen to you? Eventually?

As for the mechanisms for immortality, have you seen the Ted Talk by Aubrey de Grey? That's the model for ending ageing that I like to consider. Nothing magical, just mechanical. More like the perfect preventative maintenance program.

Matt link

8/4/2015 07:44:20 am

No, I'm not sure about any of this. I've got no data. I can extrapolate confidently, but there could easily be some kind of even horizon.

I don't think I would get tired of living. Maybe if I'd lived my millennium back when nothing changed I would have gotten bored. If I started today there would always be some new advance to explore or apply. But that's what I value. If someone valued relationships then they would only look forward to those ending.

Basically, irrevocable immortality is guaranteed to make you unhappy at some point. I doubt our biological systems could cope. The amount that could go right in infinite time is a pittance compared to the amount that could go wrong. The conscious mind could probably cope, but not the rest.

I'm reminded of stories like the twilight zone where the guy has all the time to read and immediately breaks his glasses, or the Hulk comic where the human race is extinct and the Earth is barren and Banner wants to die but Hulk won't let him. If I became immortal I would spend a lot of time cultivating my zen calm or whatever. When I inevitably get buried in a volcanoe, or have to wait for more people to evolve from geckos, I'll be able to take it in stride. *fingers crossed*

@EdGibney link

8/5/2015 03:40:30 am

Brilliant. You're evading all the traps. Looks like I'll have little to add on Friday!

winthrop staples

8/4/2015 12:05:15 pm

It occurs to me that there are two major obstacles to one enjoying either an eternal or a substantially longer life. The first is that declining health and mental ability can make life only suffering, and so restrain the range of human activity to the point that life simply is not interesting any longer. But those problems could be solved or at least alleviated much by increasing advances in health care. The second problem is one of education and motivation regarding what leads to a flourishing intellectual life as opposed to just living for emotional thrills as we are not encouraged to do by advertising indoctrination and media entertainment in order to put us in the vulnerable, gluttonous, uncritical "buying mood". It one is given the foundational knowledge and wisdom, enough initial data, and taught the methods of exploration it is conceivable that most persons could find enough interesting projects and a succession of stimulating professions to keep them happy and gainfully occupied for at least a few normal 80 something life times. The proof that this is probably true is that many scientists who retain their intellectual ability into old age are busy and excited about doing more science/research until the day they die.

Matt link

8/4/2015 12:21:57 pm

Agreed. That being said, it is also true that mindsets tend to cement. Would a happy bicentennial be permanently crushed if the thing they enjoyed doing for the last 100 years disappeared? What would someone's self image and confidence even be based on if they lived long enough to see gender rolls reverse, and their career rendered irrelevant, and their homeland burn? What does enjoyment mean on a timeline that long?

@EdGibney link

8/5/2015 03:57:41 am

This reminds me of the advice to parents to praise their children's *efforts* not their *attributes*. For example, don't say, "Great job. You are so smart." Instead, say, "Great job. You worked really hard on that." One's enjoyment shouldn't depend on definitions of gender, careers, or homelands, because science and philosophy have shows us that knowledge and definitions evolve and change. We should instead take pleasure and pride in our response to the world as we find it. I think about my blog posts on the levels of personality when I think about this. Our traits (which we can improve) on things like Openness, Neuroticism, Defence Mechanisms, etc. play a large role in our happiness, so we should really pay much more attention to them than that shiny thing on tv that advertisers want us to care about. Those traits should be durable over extremely long lifetimes no matter how the world changes around us.

@EdGibney link

8/5/2015 03:47:20 am

Very true. And it's not only scientists who have been great exemplars of staying excited and engaged with life. I remember watching an interview with George Carlin soon before he died where he was still researching, cataloguing, and writing jokes at a terrific pace. There was always new material out there for him and the goal of "perfect comedy" was forever out of reach. Obviously I'm biased, but I really think since philosophy is aimed at understanding the meaning of life, then it's philosophy that will save us when we have much more of life to make sense of.

atthatmatt link

8/18/2015 06:39:45 pm

What do you think society will look like when there are hundreds of overlapping generations? For example, imagine this diversity of opinions, but instead their formative time spanning the last 50 decades, they spanned the last couple hundred decades. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/donald-trump-voters/401408/

@EdGibney link

8/19/2015 02:09:00 am

Jeebus that was depressing. (I just read the synopses of each Trump supporter. My head would explode reading more of their "reasoning.") I'd like to think that extreme life extension would cause a major shift in the personality makeup of every human who used the technology. In a way, they'd all be forced to become wiser, which tends to look pretty similar across cultures and generations. The diversity of facts and opinions brought to the table by people whose experiences have spanned hundreds of decades might not be all that diverse when the emotional importance of any one experience gets diluted by the millennia of trial and error, progress, and survival.

Thought Experiment 20: Condemned to Life

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