Transhumanists Found a Flaw in Their Own Promise: Even Immortality Leaves Loss Intact
Transhumanists Found a Flaw in Their Own Promise: Even Immortality Leaves Loss Intact
A user on the r/Transhumanism forum published a detailed essay on the limits of what immortality actually delivers. He examines the standard transhumanist response to the objection "you will outlive everyone you love" and shows that even with this problem resolved, everything else a person values keeps disappearing. From this he draws a practical recommendation for the movement itself: speak more modestly about your promises, without giving up the goal of extending life.
The same objection to immortality has circulated in the transhumanist community for decades: if you live forever, you will eventually outlive everyone you love, and the result is endless grief. The movement's standard answer is straightforward: if immortality is available to everyone at once, no one outlives anyone, and this particular problem disappears.
The author of an essay on the r/Transhumanism forum, posted on September 26 by AlphynKing, accepts this answer and pushes further. He warns upfront that he writes as "a depressed young person with severe existential anxiety and, possibly, something like existential OCD": the topic has a personal grip on him. Even if you make absolutely everyone you love indestructible, this still fails to stop the disappearance of everything else you value: the servers of your favorite game will one day shut down, your favorite restaurant will close, your favorite clothes will wear through and tear.
This gradual fading has a physical cause: the growth of entropy, the irreversible dissipation of order known as the second law of thermodynamics, already rules out literal immortality. In the author's reading, this same force stands behind the disappearance of everything external around a person, even if death itself is one day abolished.
An infinite life unfolds on an infinite hedonic treadmill, and freedom from death and freedom from suffering are different things
He connects this thought to the Buddhist concept of non-attachment: suffering is rooted in clinging to what cannot last, whether or not the person is mortal.
This line of thinking also has a separate, non-Buddhist philosophical ancestry going back more than half a century. In 1973, the philosopher Bernard Williams, in his essay "The Makropulos Case" (discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), argued that eternal life cannot be desirable because a person will eventually exhaust every reason that makes living worthwhile. Williams wrote about the exhaustion of desires within the person; the Reddit essay concerns the decay of the surrounding world, regardless of what is happening inside the person's psyche.
The author then considers what transhumanism could theoretically offer against time itself: altering the psyche so that losses cause no pain, erasing memories of attachments, placing hope in a perfectly calibrated AI god, becoming something beyond the human. He finds none of these satisfactory.
Twice he carefully delineates the boundaries of his own argument. A finite life suffers from the same impermanence as an infinite one; his reasoning applies equally in both directions. Extending human lifespan to 150 years and curing cancer he explicitly calls a worthy goal. His criticism targets only the millenarian promises from a part of the movement, the claims that technology will one day solve everything permanently: the goal and the advertising of the goal are different things, and the advertising deserves more modest language.