Why The Dare To Bridge Immortality?
Do You Dare To Breach The ‘Impossible’?
Questioning Human Existence Prima Causa
I asked my father about the motivation and meaning of human existence once. The question was never fair.
You may make a myriad of peccadilloes, but not a blunder; once you commit one, you are ruined. As life is precious, so don't let it jeopardize your life, there is always chance to recover and let you have a natural death. - Father to Mi'kail (written in a book, read on 09.06), 2002-09.05The resilience to recover from fiascoes connotes your unimpeded will, the irretrievable soul is perdited. Life is avalued according to your courage, one should seek to explore rather than to deplore. Death is imminent, but death is not a foe, he is a friend. Only when people sedulously contemplate death, they assiduously contemplate life. What defeats you in life is not death, but life with an insular cause. We can choose to live a life of a philosopher or a philistine. We can choose to die as a hero or a hog. That choice is an authoritative factor that may turn tragedy into a triumph. - Mi'kail's confutation to his father's words, 2002-09.06"""
Since years back, I have been going back and forth thinking about how to tell you the difference between the worlds people live in. Each person's reality is as real as they think, they model their reality according to the experiences they interpret and deem it as common sense, but they are not commonly shared and reciprocated. Unbeknownst to each and everyone, the reality perceived by the other guy is a disparate oddity to them. This creates all the trouble. Between us, between you and A., between you and old Francis; and I can't say that you are to be blamed, because it is just a flawed design of nature, perhaps an intentional flaw.You once told me that what everyone should be looking forward is a peaceful death. I can't accept that, perhaps, it may be simpler if it is a contented one. For years, I struggled with my existence, and with my self-worthiness. I realized that it was not a fight for myself along the way - it shouldn't be. Life should not be merely on surviving, it has to be thriving. I need to prove this point to people out there, especially to the next generations ahead. Needless to say, it may not be reciprocated, but as long as there is a hope and the foundation of hope itself is the very fundamental thing that everyone is deficient of - the very thing that will bring us beyond our graves, and redefining both life and death, humanity will find a new horizon.I agree that life is war, it has been for you, as it is for me. This is our reality. Perhaps, not for most who have been comfortably distant from the struggle for life and death. However, this should not pose the gap between us and the people around us, especially among ourselves. This is not easy, we tend to hate people who discriminate and hate us, but aren't they suffering the same separation fate as us? Everyone is isolated from each and everyone in different degrees from everyone. Ours could be a bit intense.I am most indebted and ineffably grateful and proud that you have fought gallantly to bring us to this stage, and I also need you to acknowledge that we have too fight our own fight due to the lack of directions - specifically, the sober meaning of life. I firmly believe that the most precious gift a father can get his child, maybe the singularly most vital element for him or her to go on - on that journey of life. I also firmly believe that it will be the thing that will steer the fate of mankind.Maybe you do feel the sorrow of loneliness. I do too in many ways, and for many years. Many a times I woke in the night as a frightful child in this jungle of abandonment. When I was young, I was even wondering if I may live pass age 18. Now that I have come twice my expected longevity, and I have learnt that things are never impossible and hopeless as it seems. Science stood witness to debunk impossibilities. This is elegantly posited by Clarke's 1st Law:When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. — Arthur Charles Clarke, Clarke's 1st Law, 'Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination'. In the collection ‘Profiles of the Future’: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible (1962, rev. 1973), 14.As I stated with conviction years ago, I will work things out. Perhaps not the way the world expects, not the luxurious and glamorous way most people will clamoring for, but the most humble yet truly noble pursuit - to discover who we really are, and who we really can be. We are merely confined by what we define. Life does not need to be that hash, unfriendly and depressive. It is all in our hands, and I will be that Prometheus to bring that light of hope, courage and meaning to humankind. It is why I named my daughter - "Light/ Lamp of God". Things will change now.
- Letter to my father, 2009-07.24
"""People only say death is meaningful because that's all they know. Immortality would become just as meaningful if that was all we knew. It would take on even more meaning when we consider that there was a time when people dropped like flies for no other reason than not knowing enough. - Jason M. Vaughn
The debate was a wasted one. It could have been a discussion and co-exploratory, but I wasted it on a confutation.
Humans just arrived at the recent minutes of the Earth geologic time scale. It would take a bigot or a fool to claim to know the answer. However, that does not mean we do not work on the answer.
An Outré Idea?
We need to live longer to mine for that answer or to make one. Perhaps the answer never existed, but it is to be woven by the questions un-asked. The time given to us is just too mortally short for us to accomplish such a feat. We owe the next generations that clarity, and we need to work on it sincerely on our limited time possible.
Yet, most people who are looking for a peaceful life, have more of a hidden intent of a peaceful death. They cease to explore, study and create possibilities, and they live on limited, institutionalized conventional means. Unwittedly, they are blinded from their mundane boredom and random collision of tragedies, lest they beguiled themselves as if they do live like immortals. Worse off, they inherit and enforce the imprinting culture.
People do not believe a life beyond themselves as a reality because they only see their life as the only possibility.
People don’t mean what they say when they stated that they do not want to ‘live forever’, because they do not really understand what real ‘living’ is in the first place. What they really mean is that they do not want to ‘exist forever’ in an acrid, meaningless and pointless eternity. It is paradoxical and unreasonable for me to ask people to ‘think of the unthinkable’. For it is equivalent ask a blind man to see a color or one person to describe a taste to another person who has never savored it. We are all trapped within a bounded context, utterly absorbed and exhausted to even look beyond that Dachau fence. This is the reason why we fatalistically surrendered to the mortal fate we are given.
The problem is when the beliefs become unquestionable no matter what, and people will not want to be questioned. - 2020-07.07We are just a tiny blue dot in the universe, we aren't too big a problem yet. - Re: When told that changing the world is impossible, 2012-07.25
To work on the answer, we have to extend longevity if not to challenge the puzzle of some form of quasi-immortality. Perhaps the reason why people dare not dream of immortality is not in its immateriality, rather, it is the fear of infinity — an abyss their minds cannot comprehend nor contain.
Given an option, many people dare not live 3000 years, and not even 300 years because they do not know how it is like. Given a 3 year old kid, s/he won’t think that 30 years is too much, not because of the perception of time, but because s/he saw how a 30 year old adult had lived — s/he has an example to live by, and s/he knows it’s ok. However, s/he never seen a 300 or 3000 year old being to tell him/ her that it is ok or things will be exceedingly good. No one can imagine how it will be like being a 300 or 3000 year old being. Just imagine that a 3 year old kid who has never seen a 30 year old being, s/he won’t be able to conceive the same. There will be many unknowns and many uncertainties. The problems of declining conditions brought by mortality and draconian ergonomic conditions are the real factors that discourage them not the years themselves. Therefore, they fear the unknown and the undesirable than they fear death as the singular ultimate curse.
Anyone who believes in aging gracefully believes a car rust beautifully. No matter how much people want to kid themselves or ‘masturbating their ego’ with any social gospel no matter how poetic — There is no such thing. It is at most Ah Q’s spirit at best.
Death is a mortal sleep that wakes us from our immortal dreams. Life is a journey to find that key. - 2001-01.01Why can't we be death-defying and death-re-defining? - Re: Science and immortality, 2011-09.17Aging is an ageless immortal mortal fiend to mortals. - 2019-02.04Funerals, unfortunately, become a socially accepted depression. - 2020-11.24Humans are apathetic, all epics end with funerals. This is the real battle if we want to win, instead of cowardly picking trivial fights, fight an immortal. That immortal's name is called death. - 2020-11.24
Aging can be inevitable with the transit of time, decrepitude can be optional if medicine uncovers the cure for aging within our lifetime.
We are at the new Renaissance of Quantum Enlightenment. We are not close to many answers, but we are closing in on them, and the gods of the gaps are falling into obsolescence and soon — oblivion.
Quantum science is divine in the sense that we are beginning to witness the scientific revelation of reality and immortality in the absence of religious evidence and promise. - 2012-05.13Tarigrade is Natur’s cue for invincibility, or first hints for indestructibility, just as Turritopsis Nutricula is Natur’s cue for immortality. Now, what is the cue for omnipotence? Biomedicine should empower human to be immortal (ever-living), invulnerable (ever-immune to damage), invincible (ever and every-able). As humans should go beyond curing diseases, they will eventually cure death.
The biological pathways are more than a human mind can hold if we assume that there is a naïve way to buy time, and the riddle of immortality is more complex than a human mind can solve, we have to develop the machine to mine it. What we can give the machine is our strategy.
Science has to bring new insights to our previously unknowns. Technology should empower the human to be omniscient (all-knowing), omnipresence (all-presence), omnipotent (all-able). While solving for immortality, invulnerability and indestructibility, can we solve for omnipotence? Can we transcend from dependency to the independency of all things?
Forget yoga and new age baloney, they won't save you. Perhaps a bit of happiness can buy you another 5 years of longevity max with a dose of daily endorphin, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, but that is quite the maximum. What will you do? It will come - very soon. Look, the clock is ticking. I can tell you. When I broke down 3.5 years ago on an announcement that my mother was on end-of-life, someone told me "people die, accept it". 2.5 years from then, the same person who told me that his mother died, and my mother is still alive. I tried very hard not to tell him, "Your mother died because she had a son like you. My mother is still alive. you know why?" - 2018-01.27If you can’t solve the problem, try outliving it. - 2022-04.30
The Strayed Path Of Immortalism
I am concerned about the quality of people we may be preserving. As a scientist working along with many scientists who are determined on humanitarian causes, I have witnessed certain things that made me rethink how the human race should precede.
Cosmetic surgery has created countless surface-value lives as much as cosmetic life extension will do like wise. There is no quality added to the quantity. The basis of life of a person as well as the person himself or herself will degrade. In the end, you will only provide a solution of an empty life with an empty human chassis. If ad populum is the way to determine the direction of negligible senescence, we may be making meaningless immortals. We need quality people, not people with surface quality.
Focus on deeper values and not be distracted with surface, jejune values. If the ethos and basis are wrong, we will only create empty lives. The world is already plagued by the wrong reasons where resources have been misallocated unfairly. Longevity must also focus on equality and justice for all. We have to start from inner not surface values. We do not want to create surface-valued immortals. Youth should come with longevity, but we must drop the notion of selling `sex appeal`.
When the ethos and basis are wrong, we will only create empty lives.
Type 0 humans may not be ready for biological negligible senescence. If we found the solutions to immortality, would we be immortalizing ignorance, apathy and bigotry of the common people? I’m afraid of immortal fools, they will be zombies. However, I did think if I might be wrong in that if we give people infinite time, they will eventual figured that altruism is scientifically optimal.
If a creature, given indefinite longevity, no matter how stupid, will have its stupidity killed and cured by boredom. When a creature tries everything, except certain things, it will try those eventually that it normally will not within the common mortality. When all the wrong answers are trialed and tried, it will try the complement (curiosity and boredom will lead them there). Curiosity will, therein, refine the creature. If this assumption is true, a stupid immortal does not exist.
Our Prometheus pursuit is omnipotence and omniscience for all eternity, are we playing God? Or perhaps we do need one. - Re: Wizards to Immortals - the first leap, 2011-09.18Is death an evolutionary negligence or creationist deliberation? - Re: The imperfect adaptation or incomplete design, 2011-09.18The curse of immortality is nostalgic loneliness, such sorrow is not spared from the gods … until we re-define the divine, and re-write the story of our fate. - 2013-07.10The only reason why a human wants to live and excel - is only for the beauty and joy that its existence maintain, it seems to be its sole driving force, and desire for immortality. - 2018-03.17As we are wrestling with trivial mortal issues, the universe was left unchallenged. - 2016-05.04With trivial values, even with immortality, it can only mean an immortal trivial existence. - 2017-08.22
Le `Impossible` Gouffre Trop Loin
The possibilities could be limited by our mere mortal awareness. We tend to loosely the word “ignorant”, while the core idea is to qualify and quantify the state of unawareness. While ignorance may describe the attitude of people who are unwilling to go for considerations beyond personal beliefs, which is considered bigotry, and the unwillingness to examine further due to sloth, it is invalid for people who are working very hard on self-elevation because it discounts that effort unfairly. For many others, who are willing to work enough, it’s more of being — nescient. We never got there because we never heard of it, but the willingness to find out and change our minds is there, and many a times adamantly persistent. The question that comes to my mind is — how do I get over the fact that the word ‘nescience’ is not ignorance with a bad attitude, but just plain ‘ne’ (not) ‘scient’ (same root word ‘scientia’ from Latin meaning ‘aware or knowledge’)?
It is important to re-think what life is all about. There are really possibilities if we try hard enough. Diseases can be eradicated. One day even death can be `cured`. There will be problems, but are we going to stop there? How strong is our will? How much do we care? Are we going to put up a strong fight? Do we dare? …. or are we just going to go silently into the night. If you bring children to this world, make sure you have an answer for them. Think again — is your answer good enough? Or are you just going to — merely exist as it is — or would you love them enough — to change the universe for them? If so, shall we start?
If a possibility is real, the likelihood that it is not a nested possibility can be low. 1 possibility can create the next, especially when it has a form of intelligence to simulate or create a simulation of it. In a long chain, the probability that the possibility has high significance is not high. - 2015-08.14Every time we get dragged in and taken down that vortex of fear, we have to keep extricating ourselves from being taken off the focus of working on possibilities. - 2020-07.04I am not looking to be the 1st. I am pressing on to be the possible. - 2020-02.04Possibilities are only limited by our own self-limiting ignorance. - 2020-02.13We miss the possibilities we don't think about. - 2020-02.16The mind can only spark as much possibility as the possibilities it must first dare to hold. - 2017-08.03Try and dare the 3rd possibility, that possibility will start to take form. - 2017-08.03
Fundamentally, the belief of God is no more than the seek of assurance to afterlife. While most theists tend to beliefs that requires no further proofs, most atheists submit to an inevitable and inconsolable fatality, but what if we offer another approach?
If according to quantum physics, information cannot be destroyed. If that were to be true, won’t there be a possibility that death may not be the end?
We stop at a problem, and perhaps too prematurely concluding its finality, and though it is true presently that we have no solutions or further possibilities to death, but are we going to accept the fatality or can we prepare the future generations to go beyond death? We know so little about the universe and ourselves, and we cannot certain that we know everything about death as well.
Realize that what was magic yesterday is science tomorrow, and anything that is scientifically advanced enough is magic. Don’t just make people accept things, give them a will to change things.
Stop chanting slogans brainless like `think outside the box`, most people can't even think outside the cubicle. I don't include grumbling, cursing or sexual fantasy. I mean real clear, deep rumination. - 2015-08.14"Unlikely" and "impossible" are both poor estimation of the common minds and mistaken to be the same. - Re: Blinded by imprinted biased intuition, 2020-07.05If the questions starts speaking back to you and at you, the answers are responding. - Re: Hearing voices from the Muse, 2017-07.30We are all mutants, most mutations that take the leap are degenerative, and we don’t understand those cruel random throws. Hence, we are yet clueless victims. We cannot just leave things to chance and call it divine nature as a pretext for our complacent resignation. - to Keith, Re: Mutation, 2006-06.12Seducing fate
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Moirai (Greek: Μοῖραι, aka Fates (Latin: Fata)), were the incarnations of destiny. Their number became fixed at 3: Clotho ("spinner"), Lachesis ("allotter") and Atropos ("the unturnable", a metaphor for death). They need an estranged 4th sister - Tropopos (`modifier`) from their father Khronos and the combined feminine form of Kairos in the form of Metis (wisdom) and Tyche (chance, power: Tychokinesis).
Please replace the word `impossible` with `unlikely`, and when before you claim and assert `you will not be able to do it (esp. when someone is still in attempt stage)`, ask yourself if you meant `I was not able to do it` or `I did not even try at all. I just speculate or educate guess I can’t do it`.
Perhaps only the non-complacent people who are unwilling to accept realism, commonly mistaken as reality, are possibly the ones who will change it.
Epilogue
Why Immortality? The answer lies in why you live in the first place. Changing the dimensions of your thinking changes the dimensions of your lives. Most people are not living — they are merely existing, and they don’t even know what living is, and are probably fixated with the concept of existing because it is the only thing they understand.
Given 2 scenarios —
1. your life has no end,
2. your life ends within this 100 years.
How would your purpose be shaped? Clearly an immortal and a mortal have 2 different definitions of ‘purpose’, as the time illusion has revalued their life. Everything, as well as, takes on different meanings. Standing in between the 2 as a mental experiment so that we can entertain both possibilities, that as an immortalized mortal will live as a mortal but strive for an immortalized purpose — something that goes beyond their graves.
Embrace life and death, subsume both, contain both, and rise above them to redefine, dominate and control them, modify them. Dare to, at least, to start with. The mind most dominate first before the will finds its ways.
There is also no shame in having a problem, as long as you don’t give up, there is always tomorrow (if you care and dare to ensure that longevity) to make that hope happen.
Let’s do the economics, we can research and develop cures for many diseases, chasing all the wild rabbits as they go down the rabbit hole, or should we target the heart of their pathological cardinal — aging?
The tragedy is when people are moving from their cradle to the wheelchair, medicine is still too late to answer the call. - 2021-01.25As we had redefined death over the millenniums, we should redefine immortality. - 2020-07.10
Yet people who cannot see the obvious, we don’t have time. It’s a time bomb we have to defuse. We hear too much of waling as the penance, and it does not help us any sense. We should not even stop to hear the whining. It is too late for them. We just want to wake the people in the shortest time possible, gather allies and move. We can’t find them, that is the reason why we try to `manufacture` them, and find ways to create replicable processes to make those `humans`.
There are 2 diseases that we want to cure: aging and stupidity. Curing the latter, we would have a chance to solve the former, but if there is by any miracle to have the second and yet managed somehow beyond my imagination to cure the first, we may have immortalized fools of which god knows what hell we can also immortalized.
For sure, before we solve the aging problem, we have to solve another ageless problem — human selfishness, pride and vanity that had led us into untold tragedies of war.
The main way is to change the mentality of the society, so that the panacea to biological artificial immortality is not delayed. People need to be desperately aware, and not to be desperately regretful when it is too late. Everyday is a game, when the time is up, the game is over.
We need the next generation to stop fooling around with their mortal time, just as how the past generations had squandered their mortality to a poetic meaningless foolish Type 0 human end. What I did omit before is the question on the immortal fool or immortal evil. Though I mentioned that if we don’t do it, the rich will be sure to weaponize it — and as stated — an inevitable situation of gods and mice. Let explain to you why the immortal fool or immortal evil would not exist. The short answer is — they will come to realization given enough time. Immortality is a long time for them to think about — their past. Hopefully long enough for them to work out to derive virtues. And I hope my late mother is (as in her principles in hoping for a better humanity still are …) right.
One day, my daughter worked it out. I asked her — “if you solved for immortality what would you do?” She said — “I will come back to save you.”, and I turned to my wife — “see, I didn’t tell her, and what will be next? It will be a chain of everyone saving everyone.” The entire cosmic history of human story will be re-written. There will be 2 versions of the human story — one with tragedy, and another — with scientific salvation.
There are also other unstated concerns which is the diversity of the `cosmic forest` where the next stage humanity will evolve separately. This is another concern, and I think you may visualize what can happen in the cosmic food-chain if we do not engineer it well. The question is the riddle of — universal Kairos.
Immortality is an inevitable consequence of Assisted Evolution when humanity crosses to a certain Kardashev scale of civilization. We are already Nature engineering the evolving of Nature.
Without medical artificial immortality, you will become a memory. - Re: In the memory of, 2021-07.27Even if I were to fail, I hope I am the 1st person in the family to die, and also the last, where the cure to aging and fatality is found. - 2017-09.04
Before we build our produce, before our craft and tools, before we deliver our art, we build ourselves. The way we live and how we die, if we can’t solve the puzzle of immortality, or if we dare at all, tells the story of who we are, and who we make ourselves into. I dare our people to create a civilization of gods, to reach the ideals of nirvana with the technological bridge, which I deem as real, apart from those fake-feel good spiritualism. We have to do it together. Such that an enterprise version of the ship can be constructed. Dare to build a civilization. Dare the Omega point.
Despise no man and consider nothing impossible, for there is no man who does not have his hour and there is no thing that does not have its place. - TalmudIf immortality is part of the definition of human, perhaps, human has to evolved into gods. - 2016-02.06Part of my mind is living in the future, it hopes that the rest of it is able to catch up. - 2013-06.18Tax and death can be evitable if people work to solve the right puzzles, but the majority won't. Therefore in the meantime, there are at least 2 things that will eventually take people - aging and gravity. - 2016-12.11Be deadly determined to work on the solution or join the rest of the mortals to queue up for your mortality. - Re: Be deadly or de dead, 2018-10.15If we have no faith that we can do this within our mortality, or even cheat our mortality for more time to solve this puzzle, we have to depend on future generations to come back and reconfigure our states for this revival. Perhaps, then will the prophecy and promise be fulfilled. Type 5 civilization is indistinguishable from god. Our only chance maybe then is to ensure that ‘our message in the bottle’ reaches ’them’. - Re: Revival from the dead / non-existence, 2018-02.13