The Horrible Paradox of Immortality

[james_davis_nicoll]

The first generation of immortals will be the one with no idea how to manage an immortal life and thanks to immortality, they will never go away. Since they are the oldest immortals, they may have a lock on running things.

Hrm. If only humans could alter their behavior in response to their environment.
Mind you, why should the people in charge change their behavior? They must know what they are doing or they wouldn't be running things.

Comments

[caprine.livejournal.com]

A consequence of having no idea how to manage an immortal life may be that they go stark raving bonkers to an extent that is obvious and will result in their removal from power. One can only hope.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Maybe the methods that lead to immortality will also lead to replasticizing old brains (preferably without the hellstorm of hormones we get as teens). The experience of an 90 year old tied to the learning ability of a child might be interesting.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The books that made me think about this got immortality as a side-effect of an improvement in communications technology, not by applied biotech. Maybe that's why they never thought of improving plasticity? Except they did use the technology to address other physical limitations of Mark 1 humans.

Is there a reason why people would not modify their brains to learn easily if they could?

[silly-dan.livejournal.com]

Only example I can think of might be people who believe all possible wisdom is contained in one book, and learning any more would be dangerous to the soul. I suppose they wouldn't go in for biotech modifications anyway.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Or maybe they _tried_ plasticizing again, only to discover serious drawbacks to this state that are not apparent to children?

[silly-dan.livejournal.com]

Or, maybe tinkering with one's brain is just a lot more expensive than the regular immortality treatment and cardiovascular upgrades which are covered on most people's health insurance.

[space-parasite.livejournal.com]

It's not clear to me that you could easily replasticize a brain to learn new things very quickly and still keep everything that was in it before you hit the SQUISH button. Not an issue with children, obviously.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Bruce Sterling's "Holy Fire" come immediately to mind.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

in the Sleepless books, by Nancy Kress, she deals with all the stuff, such as the growth of the brain that comes from REM sleep, and such.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

along these same lines, I was reading a debunking of 'the death shortage' over at Reason.com the other day.

http://www.reason.com/rb/rb041305.shtml

while it just discusses people living longer, it can be extrapolated to some thoughts about immortality.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

If I were immortal, I wouldn't want to run things. Too much hassle.