Convergent thoughts about mortality at different scales
A thing I ponder frequently is the ultimate fate of the universe and the life within it. The universe is full of beauty and elegance, but those things are useless without minds to appreciate them. Therefore sentience should be maximized in duration and variety.
But we are unsure whether it’s possible for sentience to exist forever. We still don’t know for sure how the universe will develop over long time scales. Most of the current theories imply that the universe has a finite useful lifetime after which sentience is no longer possible; for example, even if the universe itself continues forever, it is likely the case that protons decay and that no new matter is created, and therefore the matter inside the universe will not exist forever. No matter, no minds.
Therefore it behooves all sentience to study this problem and try to find some means of indefinite survival.
A new thought occurred to me today: Suppose it were eventually proven that sentience cannot exist forever? Suppose this universe will eventually reach zero utility, suppose it’s impossible to move to another universe, and even suppose we can’t even leave a permanent record behind.
Well, then sentience itself would collectively face the same decision that young individuals have (mostly unconsciously) faced until recent generations: Live with this depressing and uncomfortable truth, or develop some sort of systematic insanity to make it more palatable?
When I was young, I learned that death exists and that despite best attempts, nobody has yet managed to avoid it. Thus far, living has been 100% fatal – what a rip-off! Perhaps this problem might be solved in the future, but at the time that was a far-out science fiction idea and there was no hope of it happening in my expected lifetime.
Many people of my generation and previous generations found this a pretty bitter pill. Some dealt with it via various forms of insanity: Denial by ignoring the problem entirely; the softly suicidal acceptance of death’s inevitability; the misanthropic (or even murderous if it inspires activism) belief that death is a good thing and should be preserved as is, or the baseless assumption of various kinds of immortality that don’t require bodies.
After ignoring it for a while, I chose to throw in with the group that faces the existence of death without accepting it. The Something Must Be Done crowd.
Fortunately, younger generations are less bound to make this choice. We have now realized that “death by old age” is not actually a thing; it’s just a term of convenience that means someone was killed by some combination of diseases that were incurable at the time and often too complex to bother sorting out precisely after the fact.
We’ve also realized that we are made of software-controlled microscopic protein factories, that these cells and their DNA programs are bloated and inefficient due to their evolutionary origin, and that we should therefore be able to both improve them and improve their aggregate products (us). We’re currently reverse-engineering the software that makes us and learning to improve it and write our own new versions. I am certain that, barring interference, this will lead to radical life extension and eventually a solution to the problem of finite expected lifespans (in the absence of accident, murder or suicide, of course). I have no idea when though; some generations, including mine, may be disappointed.
So here’s where the interesting parallel exists: At the individual level we’ve had to wrestle with the difficult problem of mortality in the face of the certainty of its existence so far, but now science is starting to give us some hope of a reprieve. At the level of sentience itself we, as the only example thereof we’re currently aware of, don’t know if mortality is certain and will have to do the science to find out. It’s not a perfect dovetail since at the small scale we’re moving from an assumed certainty to uncertainty and possibly to the opposite certainty, whereas at the large scale we know we’re uncertain and are trying to establish either certainty.
But if it does turn out to that finiteness of mind is certain then we’ll have to make that same choice between insanities collectively. I wonder what that will look like; I suspect it will result in large sections of the civilized universe living wastefully and dangerously.
