What, too good to die forever like every other person on Earth?
What, you think not-dying is some sort of hubristic demand?
“Not wanting to die” is a pretty vanilla position, dude. We even argue over the morality of policy in terms of how people it saves/kills! It’s pretty common!
Humanity just came up with a bunch of reasons why going feeble and insane was a good idea because they lacked the means to avoid it, not because going feeble and insane and then not-existing is actually a good thing.
There’s no point in getting yourself hyped up over vaporware. However, once the technology becomes closer to being within reach, that changes.
Death is part of the human condition, a part of reality that every religion, philosophy, and moral system invented by a culture tries to address. Of course it is hubristic to think you can bypass it. To completely bypass death is to change the nature of what it means to be alive.
The nuance between debates around “how can we make life fulfilling?”, “how can we stall death and avoidable illness?”, and “how can we prevent people from dying needlessly in dangerous situations that we are inflicting upon them?” is not the same at all as “how do we live forever?”
Every religion or tribal culture in the world has addressed the hubris about seeking immortality. Every culture has its own failure to achieve immortality myth. How is “wanting immortality is hubristic” a hot take?
Go write a bunch of symphonies if you want to live forever.
So, is heaven hubristic, then? Reincarnation? Both are extremely old takes, both are far more commonly accepted than Transhumanism.
Or are the Christians and Buddhists and so on also Transhumanists? Are they indulging in hubris?
We’ve already redefined things radically, multiple times, to even get to the point where “writing symphonies” is even possible.
It doesn’t have to be, strictly, forever. But arbitrarily going feeble and insane, and then involuntarily not existing, it’s not actually this deep, holistic or whatever thing.
And I think it’s incredibly hubristic to say that it’s up to you how much time someone should have with their parents still in their lives, and so on. Because once the capability for the technology exists, that is a decision that’s being made, not just dodging out of the decision and all responsibility thereof.
Heaven is just an ideal to regulate behavior make your actions valuable to the people around you, to make the fear of death less unbearable, and to do good on Earth while you are here. Do you really need to be reminded of the Tower of Babel parable? It has *always* been hubristic to believe that one could reach heaven or that heaven could be recreated on Earth.
You know as well as I do that it’s not real. Pretending it is real is part of the ritual. Only biblical literalists and atheists actually believe it is a real place.
You guys are the only one trying to make immortality a reality, not just an ideal.
I’m not so sure they interpret it the same way that you do.
And I’m sorry, but not wanting to die is not hubris. We’ve just expanded the definition a little farther than you’re comfortable with, because we can see that, for the first time, it’s truly coming into reach, at least for aging.
You know perfectly well that if it were the other way around, introducing aging and death therefrom would be an unthinkably evil curse, not a blessing of connection to temporality.
