“However, we might overcome the lack of total invulnerability by backing up our personalities and having a mechanism to reinstantiate that personality in a new physical embodiment.”
Except that a copy of my psychology, however perfect, is not me. So, no thanks to so-called “teletransportation”, either.
Thanks Max. It's a pleasure to see how close I feel to your analyses of the first three texts in this series :-)
I'd like to share with you an alternative proposal that we're using in France with some success.
It so happens that, since 1951 to be precise, the neologism 'amortalité' has been proposed by the philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Morin#Books >. In a text entitled "Man and Death", he defined it broadly as the absence of disease and ageing.
In my opinion, 'amortality' has a number of advantages that address some of your concerns. Firstly, because it is similar to "immortality", it appeals to people in the same way. It is immediately associated with "immortality". It's immediately clear what the theme is. But at the same time, you immediately see that it's different. So the reader is left to wonder what makes the difference.
Secondly, where the prefix 'im-' indicates the opposite of death, i.e. eternal life, the privative 'a' simply indicates the absence of death. We could say that amortality is the situation of the living as long as death is absent, and it can be indefinite.
Ever since the AFT-Technoprog began its work, just over fifteen years ago, we have been working to make this term heard in the public arena, and I think I can say that we have achieved something. Little by little, the term 'amortalité', which had fallen into oblivion since its invention, and which was never used in discussions on transhumanism, has begun to find its place. It is understood, and we can use it every time someone criticises us by saying that, like religious people, or, as they say, in a childish way, we want to be immortal.
Last, Edgar Morin must know a thing or two about amortality, as he is about to celebrate his 103rd birthday!
Recently the Principia Cybernetica Project undertook a computer‐based collaborative effort to develop a unified system of philosophy. The philosophy and its implementation are explicitly based on evolutionary principles of variation and natural selection (VNS) and a fundamental type of emergence called MetaSystem Transition (MST) which increases the overall freedom and adaptivity of systems. MST, conceived and articulated by Turchin (1977), occurs when a control subsystem is replicated and integrated into a whole through a higher level VNS generated control subsystem. Turchin also articulated the concept of “the will to immortality” which led to Heylighen's (1991) formulation of cybernetic immortality (CI) contingent on immortal meme systems, metarational consciousness, and limitless knowledge. A possible direction of future evolution is the emergence of further levels of organization realized in "superbeing/metabeings.” The precise configuration of these “beings” is still open; an aspect or totality of which may be viewed as "cybernetic immortality.” In this paper, I review aspects of memes and MST as the basis for cybernetic immortality, discuss the potential for further MetaSystem Transitions in humans and human culture (trans‐sapiens and trans‐culture) , generalized CI constructs and interactions between cybernetically immortal constructs. Finally, some reflections are offered concerning the role of CI constructs in future evolution and the evolution of the future." - I stoppe, or perhaps paused [a better word now], as I sensed unresolved problems might ensue. There are some ethical issues that need addressing. One of them is 'off ramping'.
“However, we might overcome the lack of total invulnerability by backing up our personalities and having a mechanism to reinstantiate that personality in a new physical embodiment.”
Except that a copy of my psychology, however perfect, is not me. So, no thanks to so-called “teletransportation”, either.
Thanks Max. It's a pleasure to see how close I feel to your analyses of the first three texts in this series :-)
I'd like to share with you an alternative proposal that we're using in France with some success.
It so happens that, since 1951 to be precise, the neologism 'amortalité' has been proposed by the philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Morin#Books >. In a text entitled "Man and Death", he defined it broadly as the absence of disease and ageing.
In my opinion, 'amortality' has a number of advantages that address some of your concerns. Firstly, because it is similar to "immortality", it appeals to people in the same way. It is immediately associated with "immortality". It's immediately clear what the theme is. But at the same time, you immediately see that it's different. So the reader is left to wonder what makes the difference.
Secondly, where the prefix 'im-' indicates the opposite of death, i.e. eternal life, the privative 'a' simply indicates the absence of death. We could say that amortality is the situation of the living as long as death is absent, and it can be indefinite.
Ever since the AFT-Technoprog began its work, just over fifteen years ago, we have been working to make this term heard in the public arena, and I think I can say that we have achieved something. Little by little, the term 'amortalité', which had fallen into oblivion since its invention, and which was never used in discussions on transhumanism, has begun to find its place. It is understood, and we can use it every time someone criticises us by saying that, like religious people, or, as they say, in a childish way, we want to be immortal.
Last, Edgar Morin must know a thing or two about amortality, as he is about to celebrate his 103rd birthday!
Great read that.
Nice discussion. I love the details and expansion of the possibility space. Almost 30 years ago, I 'played' with related ideas at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02604027.1995.9972558 - (Abstract:
Recently the Principia Cybernetica Project undertook a computer‐based collaborative effort to develop a unified system of philosophy. The philosophy and its implementation are explicitly based on evolutionary principles of variation and natural selection (VNS) and a fundamental type of emergence called MetaSystem Transition (MST) which increases the overall freedom and adaptivity of systems. MST, conceived and articulated by Turchin (1977), occurs when a control subsystem is replicated and integrated into a whole through a higher level VNS generated control subsystem. Turchin also articulated the concept of “the will to immortality” which led to Heylighen's (1991) formulation of cybernetic immortality (CI) contingent on immortal meme systems, metarational consciousness, and limitless knowledge. A possible direction of future evolution is the emergence of further levels of organization realized in "superbeing/metabeings.” The precise configuration of these “beings” is still open; an aspect or totality of which may be viewed as "cybernetic immortality.” In this paper, I review aspects of memes and MST as the basis for cybernetic immortality, discuss the potential for further MetaSystem Transitions in humans and human culture (trans‐sapiens and trans‐culture) , generalized CI constructs and interactions between cybernetically immortal constructs. Finally, some reflections are offered concerning the role of CI constructs in future evolution and the evolution of the future." - I stoppe, or perhaps paused [a better word now], as I sensed unresolved problems might ensue. There are some ethical issues that need addressing. One of them is 'off ramping'.