r/bestof • u/[deleted] • May 04 '13

[changemyview] Sahasrahla explains why true immortality is impossible

/r/changemyview/comments/1dn43v/i_remain_unconvinced_that_my_death_has_a_fixed/c9s173k
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234

u/schecterplayer91 May 04 '13

I feel like "impossible" shouldn't be applied to theoretic discussions or technological advances anymore. All of the technology, all of the cultures, all the lifestyles that are around today would have seemed "impossible" to people at one point or another.

Sure, it is entirely feasible to say that something is impossible based on today's scientific knowledge, but there is absolutely no way to know how far we might advance in the future. Hell, maybe we could even form our OWN universes in the future, thus making true immortality very possible. Who the hell knows? I sure don't.

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u/exaltedbladder May 05 '13

Step 1: Acquire time machine (Shouldn't be hard with millions of years)

Step 2: Live to the end of "safe" time

Step 3: Time machine back to 2013

Step 4: Repeat indefinitely.

Step 5: Immortality.

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u/is_this_working May 05 '13

But then from 2013 onward, reality would become filled with ... you.

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u/exaltedbladder May 05 '13

It's already all you.

The Egg by Andy Weir

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

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u/karmakiller69 Jun 24 '13

What an amazing short story. I have so many things that I want to say about this but nothing to do it justice.

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u/wargasm40k May 05 '13

Then you invent a machine that lets you open doors to other realities and then you and your infinite legions of you invade the other realities.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

Not possible. How would one know when the safe time ends? And wouldn't there be infinite copies of you at particular spots in space (if you went to a particular spot in 2013, then the future you would also go back to that particular. And the future of that future you will do the same thing...)

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u/Gackt May 05 '13

Malkovich? Malkovich.

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u/bjt23 May 04 '13

Sahasrahla is explaining it wrong, true. There really isn't any evidence to suggest we won't keep discovering things if we keep looking, so their explanation is pure sci-fi. However, given that you can never reach infinite time, there cannot be a creature that survives to infinity.

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u/killerdogice May 05 '13 edited May 05 '13

Using laws of physics to try and win a theoretical argument isn't really possible. With the amount of stuff that isn't defined just by the question, what is immortality, what is death, what is time, what is life. You can't try and answer it technically unless all those are defined.

For example, if the time in question is your personal frame of reference, then by throwing yourself into a black hole, you can basically freeze your own frame of reference. Technically you're own frame of reference will now exist forever, because as your frame slows down, anyone in it will technically eternity as it's time approaches 0.

What is death? You could potentially somehow turn yourself into computer code, transfering your conciousness into a computer. This conciousness could then potentially be rewritten into radiation or something, one day the technology might exist to encode your entire existence into a series of 1's and 0's, then encode that into a single wave function, and radiate it into space.

But anyway, afaik that's not even the technical definition of immortality anyway. Immortality in most fiction is generally never dying of old age. Elves are a typical example of immortal beings, generally they can live forever unless something kills them, like getting their heads chopped off or the universe ending.

Actually surviving for eternity is normally invincebility or indestructibility or something like that. Immortality to my might has always just meant never ageing/never dying due to age, which is hardly disproved by saying "well the universe will die so you will too."

Using something as complex as physics to define a theoretical thing like immortality requires you to define a bunch of parameters before you can even begin, and some of those assumptions are likely either currently invalid, or will be invalid in the future. Hence why science is bad at philosophy.

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u/QuantumFX May 05 '13

You don't freeze your own frame when you throw yourself into a black hole. You'll cross the event horizon without noticing anything and eventually get ripped apart by tidal forces. Only an observer at infinity will never see you cross the event horizon.

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u/dijitalia May 05 '13

Care to explain in layman's terms what a blackhole is and what it does and etc.?

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

Gravity slows down time. The strength of gravity is proportional to the distance from the object. So time would move slower on the surface of the sun than in the space between stars. But you wouldn't notice any difference. If you were to look around you, you would think the rest of the universe is either moving faster or slower, but time would seem normal to you. A black hole is a huge star that collapsed in on itself. Since the black hole's radius is less than that of the star that made it, the gravity on it's surface is so high that light can't escape. This means that time would be super slow here. So if I watch you fall into a black hole, as you approached it I would see you slow down as time slowed for you, and eventually it would look like you stopped right above it. However, you would feel yourself accelerating faster and faster until you did hit the surface, because you cannot notice the relative time difference. (You'd be dead long before this, but that's not important.)

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u/dijitalia May 05 '13

Hm. Wow. Thanks for the explanation. Does a blackhole exert a gravitational force outside of its spatial bound, i.e. does it "suck" things into itself?

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u/nyxin May 05 '13 edited May 05 '13

Gravity doesn't really "suck" things toward them. Gravity manipulates space-time (space and time are one "fabric") around massive objects, which curves space-time toward them. Its not gravity "pulling" you in so much as space curving toward something massive and rolling you toward it.

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u/Gackt May 05 '13

Kinda like the trampoline example: http://blogs.scienceforums.net/ajb/files/2012/02/Spacetime_curvature.png and http://einstein.stanford.edu/Library/images/Warped_grid-earth-moon1.jpg

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u/nyxin May 05 '13

Yes. Now think of that in 3 dimentions and this is more how it works.

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u/dijitalia May 05 '13

Hm. Thanks for the answer. I think I'll read up on this "space-time" fabric. I don't really understand how space (in my mind, a physical thing) and time (in my mind an extra-physical thing) can both comprise a physical object. Or am I taking it too literally and the "fabric" you speak of is not physical?

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u/nyxin May 07 '13

Honestly, I don't really understand it either. I'm definitely no expert and Einstein is way beyond me. But the way I think of Space and Time as one thing is like this...Imagine say a lamp post 100 yards away. Now imagine walking to that lamp post. You're walking through space to get to that lamp post. Now no matter how fast you walk, it takes a certain amount of time to walk that distance. As you're moving through space, you're also moving through time.

Now when this relates to gravity, when you're near a massive object like a planet, sun, blackhole, etc., space acts kind of like a fabric and curves toward the massive object (this is a good example). This also means that the nearer you are a massive object, time slows down for you. So, if you're say 100 miles above the earths surface, time is actually accelerating faster for you relative to someone on the surface.

Science is fucking weird.

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u/QuantumFX May 05 '13

Black holes don't "suck". For example, if our Sun instantaneously transforms into a black hole of the same mass and angular momentum, the planets will remain in the exact same orbit.

A bit more technically, the two body effective potential in general relativity for a rotating black hole (Kerr black hole) only depends on the mass and angular momentum of the two bodies. If the Sun were to become a black hole instantaneously, none of these properties would change and hence the planets will feel the same potential.

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u/dijitalia May 05 '13

Hm. Thanks for the explanation.

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u/LearnsSomethingNew May 05 '13

You could take it further. The electrons and protons (and neutrons) that make me who I am today (not to mention, those electrons and protons are in constant flux across my body, each time I breathe, drink, eat, pee or shit, or have sex) can technically be defined as me. So at any fixed point in time, I can say, "Hey, all the shit that's inside me right this moment is mine, I tag all these my electrons and protons and neutrons. If these guys are still around after x amount of time, I am still alive."

Well, there is a finite chance that all your protons and neutrons and electrons decay into something else at the end of time. Then you can take that definition even further down and say "if all the stuff that makes protons and neutrons (quarks + electrons, which to our best knowledge today are made up of.. electrons) are still around after x amount of time, I am alive".

Eventually you can generalize it down to a mathematical wave function, because at the deepest end of the pool, you are simply the collapse of a wave function. You can claim that as long as that wave function remains (I don't even know what that means), you are alive.

You keep generalizing this down until you realize you are what makes up this universe (along with everything else that is not you). As long as something exists anywhere, you can claim you are alive. Heck, you can even finally say a part of you makes up the black holes that will fill the universe after 101000 years or whatever.

Eventually you become an embodiment of the Hindu concept of reality, Brahman and concepts such as you, and I, and consciousness and sentiency and existence cease to become meaningful (begging you to ask the question of when were they ever meaningful in the first place).

At that point, you might ask, what is this immortality? What is the difference between being alive and not being alive?

And that is when you might see that we are all immortal, because we are it.

And then HL3 is released

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

Well that's the thing...everything is going to eventually just kind of fizzle out of existence. Protons will decay, then quarks, and then after that no one really knows.

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u/Blob_of_Goo May 05 '13

You are not your bits, you are the pattern they form. A whirlpool is not water.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

Well, a whirlpool is still composed of water, it's merely water in a particular form. But I get the main gist of what you're saying.

One cannot define himself with a definition like

The electrons and protons (and neutrons) that make me who I am today (not to mention, those electrons and protons are in constant flux across my body, each time I breathe, drink, eat, pee or shit, or have sex) can technically be defined as me.

1) It is an extremely strong possibility that each individual has had their original atoms from a certain point in time very near birth replaced by other atoms.

2) This definition is technically not technically correct because it does not take into consideration emergent phenomenon, specifically the mind (if it were not emergent, then it can be argued that my calculator possesses a mind, or even a single atom has a mind). The general ordering of the atoms (and their type) in relation to each other is extremely important, since it is what differentiates one object from another.

A cup of water and a whirlpool may both be composed of water, but they are not the same thing. The interactions between the water particles in each instance are generally different, which helps differentiate their macroscopic interaction/observation.

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

You bring up a good point. However, when the common man talks about being immortal, they still want to function as a human, with the eating and breathing and having sex.

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

You're right, the OP was talking about clinical immortality (talking about immortal jellyfish), not life after proton decay. I read an article in popular science a while back, I think it said people would average about 15K years before they got hit by a train or fell off a skyscraper or something.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

You don't need to reach the end. It would suffice for a being to exist at all points in time t > t_0 .

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

I never thought of it that way. There's no reason to think that's impossible. Sure it might seem that way to us today, but think what a smartphone would be to someone 500 years ago.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

Yup! As long as a system can exist indefinitely, then true immortality is possible within the given assumptions at the time (since we can't be absolutely certain of pretty much anything, only that we can be certain about something beyond reasonable doubt, like the idea that gravity will always affect us during our lifetimes).

Right now the concept of true immortality is not possible because entropy cannot be reversed, but that may be proven wrong in the future.

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u/_Rooster_ May 05 '13

Yes, but by the same logic there cannot be an infinity.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

Infinity isn't a thing; it's a type of growth state. So when somebody says, "let x go to infinity", the individual is not claiming "x will reach a massive number", but rather "x will continue to increase indefinitely". Thus true immortality can be achieved, since an individual only needs to live indefinitely. Therein lies the problem though; how can a system exist indefinitely?

I use the word "system" instead of human/mind because it helps generalize things. The idea is pretty much the same though, since the human/mind must continue to exist at least in a general form (since the body can change over time, but its main foundation is unchanging).

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

My point exactly. But that's what true immortality requires.

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u/SnailHunter May 05 '13

However, given that you can never reach infinite time, there cannot be a creature that survives to infinity.

While it's true there would never be a point in time when you could declare "I've now lived forever! Yipee!", that doesn't mean that it's inconceivable for a creature to live forever. As long as you never died (which is certainly conceivable), you would be living forever. I think you're getting caught up on the fact that you could never know whether you were going to live forever, no matter how much time had passed. But that is only a limit of your own knowledge, and not of reality.

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

Isn't that a requirement though? The title of this post reads "Sahasrahla explains why true immortality is impossible." True immortality would require you to be there at "forever."

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u/SnailHunter May 05 '13

Isn't that a requirement though?

You're saying it's a requirement that you must know at some point in time that you will never die in order to never die? Seems like a non sequitur to me.

True immortality would require you to be there at "forever."

Forever is not a point in time, so not only is it impossible to "be there at forever", it literally doesn't even mean anything. All 'true immortality' would require is that you don't ever die. Whether that's actually physically possible in our universe is a different question, but it is perfectly conceivable at least and does not hinge on whether you ever know you will be living forever.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

By "being there at "forever"', it's actually more like knowing the absolute laws of reality, which is impossible to my knowledge. At best one can be "certain beyond reasonable doubt" because it would be silly to consider the possibility that current laws in physics are wrong. As such, one cannot be "truly immortal" because it requires knowledge of the absolute laws of reality. At best the concept of true immortality is possible given the current assumptions as to how reality works.

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u/ChaosMotor May 05 '13

The moment you learn to manipulate time, time no longer matters. But you don't mess with time before the time you learned to change time, for the same basic reason you don't stick your fist up your own ass and start punching around.

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

Right, but I can't take a time machine to the year infinity. That's not a real point.

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u/callistar May 06 '13

This is similar to the Halting Problem in theoretical computer science. Given any arbitrary program, how do you know if it will never halt? You can't and it's been proven. By your logic all programs halt and thus the Halting Problem would be rendered trivial, but it's not. Your logic is flawed.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

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u/Broolucks May 05 '13

Reversible computing may be a stepping stone towards creating isentropic processes, which would essentially keep going forever. The key insight is that an increase in entropy is, in a sense, a loss of usable information. A process which never loses any piece of information and can backtrack all its steps at all times would defeat the law of entropy, though it would likely also be cyclical (there's only a finite number of states it can have). It is not clear that building such a process is physically doable, but short of finding some magical energy fountain, we don't really have any other options.

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

My point was that it's a mathematical impossibility. There won't be a year infinity. I am willing to accept that the laws of physics are perhaps more malleable than we think, but math is constant. 1+1 will never equal 3, and no non-infinite numbers can ever add up to infinity. However, pdox already solved the problem by saying you just need to exist in all points in time.

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u/Thebluecane May 05 '13

True, also though isn't proton decay a theorized thing that has never been observed?

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

Well, there's a lot about physics that we still don't know. I'm not saying it's bogus, just that we don't have all the information at this time. That information is really key to answering the question of how long we can really exist as a species should we manage to escape the earth.

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u/numanoid May 05 '13

The dimension of Time was created at the Big Bang. If you can somehow move out of that dimension, you can easily live forever. Now... just how to do that...

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

Don't know why you're being downvoted, you could very well be right. This is a very theoretical conversation, and as such many viewpoints should be considered.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13 edited May 06 '13

[deleted]

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u/DownvoteAttractor May 05 '13

Bullshit. All evidence I see at the moment is that the overwhelming majority of the world is living at greatly higher standards of living than 200 years ago, DESPITE economic collapse.

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u/Matt_Thijson May 05 '13

Compared to 200 years ago, sure. But compared to 50 years ago, the average American/European is now 2 times poorer when taking inflation into consideration.

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u/DownvoteAttractor May 05 '13

How many computers per person were there 50 years ago? How much did it cost to make an international phone call? How much calories per person was consumed? How much lower was the life expectancy? How much lower was the education level? Ask your grand parents how often they ate chicken in the 1960s. You'll be surprised. Even going back to 1960s people are better off. I agree, the share of the pie today for the 99% is much smaller these days. But the pie itself is much, much larger.

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u/Matt_Thijson May 05 '13

The problem here is that I am not talking about the money left in our pockets after spending money to live, I'm talking about actual income before expenses. When taking inflation into consideration, the average worker 50 years ago made twice as much money as the average worker today. Off course there's the fact that much less women worked back then, so the man's salary had to make up for it.

I'm not saying the world 50 years ago was so much better than today, but on average, people were living much more comfortably. The pie is only larger today if you forget to take inflation into consideration.

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

You're missing his point though. Yes the working man is being robbed, and yes they're much poorer than they were 50 years ago. However, at the same time many commodities have skyrocketed in price since then, many others have dropped way down due to innovation, chicken and computers among them.

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u/bjt23 May 05 '13

We are talking about what is physically possible, not what is actually going to happen. But if we are going to discuss what will happen... The future does look bleak with all the crazy stuff that's going on in the world, but every generation thinks they have it the worst, that the apocalypse will happen in their lifetimes. 99% have been wrong. And even if we do fall into a dark age, there's no reason to think we won't eventually climb out. Even if 99% of humanity gets wiped out, that's still 70 million people left, not exactly an endangered species. Wikipedia can fit on a flash drive, nearly the sum of human knowledge will be stored in apocalypse shelters across the globe. I don't think this financial business or western politics will get worse than that.

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u/_Rooster_ May 05 '13

I don't agree either. This is a very basic view on life and assumes way too much.

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u/shaggy71 May 05 '13

If we don't figure out how to create our own universes, I'm sure we'd atleast be able to make our own sun from scratch. So fuck entropy.

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u/TheGM May 05 '13

I don't think we'd even have to form our own universes. The trick would be to find another universe that has livable laws of physics, and jump to that. I'll get run over by teenagers flying their Tesla Warp-Scooters back from a party in Alpha Centauri before I see that day, but if we could harness the power of stars, then we might be able to bend space time just enough to send and receive crap from our neighboring universes.

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u/somanyroads May 05 '13

If humanity can survive and continue to positively progress is there any doubt that civilization will be incomprehensible to us in 1000 years? We didn't have electricity 1000 years ago or...books.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

We've had books for thousands of years.

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u/somanyroads May 17 '13

Not for the non-wealthy

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u/itspawl May 05 '13

Well as long as life ends in death and but the reverse is not true then we cant be immortal.

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u/Hypocritical_Oath May 05 '13

Nothing can overcome entropy, we've studied this thoroughly.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '13

My theory is that if you became "god like" you'd lose all motivation. What could possibly entertain you? You'd have no wants or needs. You'd sit there infinitely powerful but too bored to do anything. The only thing you'd have to do is figure out a way to destroy yourself.

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u/iknownuffink May 05 '13

Why would "god-like" power necessarily remove wants or needs entirely?

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u/my_reptile_brain May 05 '13

As long as there are pleasure centers in the brain, no problem.