The Melting World

I still have a hard time imagining a human mind as separated from the body and from the natural, as a floating autopoetic code. For one, I don’t imagine such a type of projected immortal existence as pleasurable or advantageous for me (I actually like being ‘in’ this big happy/sad messy world and a cup of coffee is all I need for a jolt now and then).

Kurzweil, the AI (artifical intelligence) theorist, has a book called FANTASTIC VOYAGE, where he feels we now have the technologies needed to become immmortal. He imagines he will soon keep his body immortal as part and parcel for his immortal mind. As an AI researcher at Mirai Daigaku told me last week, Kurzweil is these days busily popping vitamins to preserve his body. But again, I can’t see the joy in being frozen physically or tweaked artificially by new intrusive technologies, although I know the argument that it already happens in much of western science/medicine and this is a logical progression. It seems such a life would be tedious and it seems non-stop intervention would be needed to maintain this kind of immortality.

I guess I can’t imagine not eventually aging–isn’t that sometimes a joy for humans, the returning to one’s feeble beginnings and facing death: is it always necessarily negative?

In sum, like some have mentioned in my graduate class, the egoism of such thinkers is somewhat blatant and narrow, as it seems to define life as something to be conquered and controlled. As long as their ideas remain self-focused, however, I see no harm in their choices. If such ideas were to be forced upon us as a society, then I would resist the idea more.

I am more in support of a theory of life as a cycle, with no exact end to be feared, thus we already have immortality in a natural sense, our bodies should return to the earth and return as whatever the earth found useful. We can help that cycle with technologies, slow that cycle with technologies, but I wonder if we should tamper with its overall shape/movement? Would that be true immortality then if we stop the cycle? Who would care for such entities? I am definitely not interested in being Kurzweil’s immortal babysitter! 😉