When I hear people say stuff like this, I hear that they want to remove the single most universal chesterton's fence in all of living systems. I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.

Biological singletons (outside very specific niche situations) are not meant to persist, and most anything that has tried, it has simply been selected out of the lineage. This constraint (which we don't understand yet) is presumably the whole reason why biology discovered and moved into the more ephemeral higher-order substrate of thought and culture.

Just my feelings though. Feel free to disagree.

It isn't even a rule of biology. There are living things with much longer lifespans than humans, some even effectively immortal (absent predation or accident or climate change).

Your language implies you believe in a creator of some sort, something making decisions about how things should be. You've called it "biology", but "biology" doesn't "discover" or have a "reason" for doing things.

> I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.

I hear you taking pride in accepting death on a quite short timespan as a necessity, and hubris that one individual living longer puts "the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk".

We have already disconnected from evolution, to a large degree. Many people who would have died in childhood a couple hundred years ago now survive to adulthood and procreation.

Should we stop vaccinating children because they were supposed to die to protect the delicate balance? Surely it is hubris to prevent their deaths when evolution and biology discovered polio and smallpox to kill and maim them? If there is a biological Chesterton's fence it is probably sitting somewhere around five years old and half of people wouldn't make it past it.

It most certainly does not.

There is an assumption of correctness in the argument that "we must die because we do die". It's tautology. That doesn't comport with my understanding of how we got here, and I don't believe there is an answer to "why" we are here, beyond the meaning we make of our own lives. If our 70-90 year lifespan (if we're lucky and aren't struck down younger) is an evolutionary accident, and I believe it is, then extending that lifespan is Good, Actually.

"Why do we have a heart" "Why do we sweat", etc.

But Chesterton's fence is often used in an even MORE generalized way than just that, not "why is it there" but "what are we not seeing about how this connects to everything else"

As an example, eradicating mosquitos. We see many obvious reasons why it might be good, we can even see that they don't seem that important in the food chain, but it would be hubris to assume we understand every potential connection they have to world ecology.

But, I should be clear, I don't believe there's any reason to believe the answer is "because we're supposed to die". There is no "supposed to" in evolution, no right or wrong, no ethics, only survival. It is merely a series of improbable occurrences that led us to this point, and I see no reason to attribute moral intention to the result.

Every argument for death, absent a religious decree, comes down to "because everyone who has ever lived has eventually died, usually painfully" so it must be correct because everyone does it, even though most of those folks would have rather not.

And, the reason we don't is almost certainly mundane; we aren't needed after procreation, according to evolution. But, I think humans still have value after they have procreated.

"Thermodynamic evolution" says that sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice. Yes, I do think we're more clever than that.

That's not what I'm saying. Sick kids dying is not the same as old people living and holding social/economic/positional/etc capital into perpetuity.

And further, what I'm saying is about "us" as a larger living system, at coarse-grain scale. We each live at fine-grained scale. Negotiating truths and values between those is the fuckin work of being alive. Bluntly, some might reasonably ask: who would reasonably prioritize your individual happiness and health if the cost on your society/culture means a trend toward collapse? That's not me saying "I don't care about you" (I do!) but it's me pointing out that there are fuzzy lines when negotiating values across scales. A thing that makes you happy (heck, that makes a majority happy) might conceivably invite some variant of the endtimes. Something good for the health of some parts can be bad for the health of the whole.

Death is part of our thriving and a part of us ("us" in the Gaian sense) at the largest coarse-grain scale, though it hurts like hell at the fine-grain one

What evidence do you have that people living longer would cause a trend toward collapse? What evidence do you have that people who live longer and without debilitating health problems wouldn't care more about the future of our planet and society and be able to achieve more toward improving it?

You're accusing people who want to live longer of selfishly causing societal collapse acting as though you're taking a moral high road, preserving a precious thing, but you're arguing that 8 billion people alive today should die. That's a remarkable bit of ethical gymnastics and a monstrous position to take by my reckoning.

I was kind of OK with it when I was thinking, "OK, religious people believe nobody ever really dies." Which I believe is a fairy story, but one that many people believe and are raised to believe. But, yours seems to be your own brand of religion, and it doesn't even pretend people actually never die and go to heaven but you want it to happen to everyone anyway, which is really something.

It is very easy for them to say "people should die" on an Internet forum. On their (or a family member's) deathbed, presented with a cure to death, they would say something very different. When push comes to shove, no one but the suicidal actually hold the belief that people should die.

In my experience the pro-death crowd takes this stance because they don't dare to dream of a world in which death is cured - because you can't get hurt by the potential of a future you don't believe in.

Collapse is evident in that almost nothing survives being immortal except cancers and flatworms. You witness the evidence of this "collapse" all around you in that virtually nothing deigns to live forever and tell the tale (genetically speaking), and then you call me neglectful of some evidence?

And as for your challenge, you don't know the conversations I've had with people I love. The politics of immortality are so challenging that I prefer not to write my sincere beliefs on the public internet.

EDIT: I do appreciate the chance to engage with ppl so different from the sort I regularly speak with, and so am grateful for the words, even if it seems we are both a little frustrated by them. Which is to say, thanks

The political problem is a solvable one. We have been solving such problems for millennia. It is not a reason for eight billion people to die.

Because it hasn't happened?

EDIT: I say this as someone who's had my own moments of hypomanic energy, seemingly from the momentum of moving toward my goals (that I am previously accustomed to moving more slowly towards)

Imho people should just respond to actual ideas instead of constantly engaging in the second-order critique of how the language may or may not have been created.

It strikes me as the intellectual equivalent of "gossip" to be constantly engaging in second-order commentary on words. Of course gossip has its place and purpose, but if we seem to only let our minds live at that level, we're not moving between all the required scales of thinking that are required of this moment imho <3

Personally I consider it equally valid for people to publicly express annoyance with somebody's choice of words and for everybody to completely ignore that annoyance.

LLMs in a nutshell

But those people believe that sloppy wording is itself a strong signal that the speaker/writer is the one lacking in substance, and doesn't deserve the attention or trust of the listener.

We all know that clanker language is often ridiculously bad. Got it.

Maybe policing every word and sentence and lodging your complaint along with all the other similar complaints is the right move. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. But meanwhile we're degrading the overall discourse on the topic at hand.

I'm not saying which is right, I'm saying there's a cost to constantly expressing one's annoyance on a well-worn subject. If you click a thread about X to read complaints about Y, we're doing great I guess.

I'm not sure if it's their intent, but I wonder if one could still consider these artifacts as "intentional", but not individual attention creating them, and rather an aggregate, soupy collective attention.

Obviously, important signal in the human experience is lost there, and we get a soupy middling sort of creation. But it's not random, as I believe the parent was pointing out.

EDIT: overall, I align with the article. am just thinking aloud about the contrarian positions, though not committed to them

[1] https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/maths/staff/4058/dr-vincenzo-l-manto...

Writing locks in and requires the evolution of other forms of evolution, as the Word can no longer evolve during transmission.

I say that while being firmly on your side in the larger back-and-forth exchange here :)