If Death is Eliminated, Life Doesn’t Get Boring
In my latest Newsweek Op-Ed I address a major concern many people have about trying to stop death and aging through science. This philosophical argument may allow for more funding and support in the field of life extension.
Philosophers say that if we didn’t have to die, our lives would be boring. The idea of temporal scarcity argues that the finiteness of life is what makes it worth living. Transhumanists who are most concerned with using science to defeat biological death strongly disagree.
Since the 1960s, essays and books have been written to analyze and debate the issue of time scarcity. Transhumanists’ original idea is reviving the debate. The idea does not discount the scarcity of time in biological humans, but it does in what we will become in the near future – cyborgs with digitalized consciousness.
In the traditional argument against immortality, the human being is portrayed as biologically unchanged for thousands of years. The human race has already begun to augment the human body using radical technology. Over 200,000 people have already been fitted with brain implants around the world. Silicon Valley companies such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink work to make millions of us cyborgs.
Experts are increasingly predicting that by the end the century humans will be able to upload their brain and consciousness into computers. Digitalized people will be able to overcome the biological death of their bodies and adopt far more complex forms of existence, including new conceptions of consciousness and selfhood.
Source:
https://www.newsweek.com/eliminating-death-doesnt-mean-life-will-get-boring-opinion-1806080
