>I’m pretty sure the breakdown of the human body due to aging and wear and tear would lead to organism death well in advance of trillions of years. > >Even the elderly consume the same amount of energy as the young but just eating can’t extend life forever.

This break down of the body is something encoded into our DNA, not something dictated by the nature of reality. We have found life forms on Earth that appear to be biologically immortal and can continously regenerate themselves, seemingly without end as far as we can tell.

>Entropy is at work at all times to move systems from highly improbable states like human beings into highly probable states. It’s very much a problem.

Entropy only necessarily increases in a closed system. The human body is very much not a closed system. As long as there is other entropy to increase (such as from un-fused hydrogen or un-evaporated black holes), there is no physical reason we cannot keep the entropy of a human body low over very long time periods.

>It’s at work at all times. It only needs to work once. This is why magic is impossible and why the hard problem of death will never be solved.

Again, only in closed systems. If you spill milk on the floor nothing is physically stopping you from sucking it back up into the carton. Though the action of doing so will increase the overall entropy of the universe, even if it decreases the local entropy of the milk-carton-floor system.

>Heck even computer systems degrade with time if you wanna go the human consciousness in computers route. Entropy defines the limits of the possible.

I mean, if you never repair the computer (which you totally can, no magic needed I promise), sure they'll degrade over time.

Death also isn't needed for evolution, only varying amounts of reproduction between individuals.

Specifically, death by aging is likely an unintential outcome of evolution, rather than something that evolution needs in order for it to happen. I can get into the mechanics of how aging likely evolved, but it is a bit a biology lesson.

I would also hesitate to say that we have stopped evolving in "interesting ways" (whatever that means). Evolution happens on a very slow time scale and I do not think anyone has a good handle on what our current environment most selects for or how strongly it selects for it. Seeing how it is difficult to point to any evolutionary changes in the past 5,000 years (a vast majority of which were before modern medicine and food production techniques), to say definitively we have stopped evolving in the last 50-100 years since the invention of antibiotics and vaccines and adoption of modern agriculture is jumping the gun a bit.

Especially since it isn't like we've totally eradicated untimely deaths (that is to say death before reproduction). We still have 3.1 million young children dying of starvation and 5 million dying of disease each year. Even ignoring deaths among older children/teenagers, we are losing over 1 person in 20 before they have a chance to reproduce.

Even ignoring the modern death rates among young children and babies, there is still a great discrepancy in birth rates among individuals and that is what evolution actually acts on. An adult who made a conscious decision not to have children (an increasingly common phenomenon) is just as evolutionarily unfit as a baby who died before their first birthday.

For a population to be truly evolutionary stable it needs to be infinitely large (8 billion may approximate that), each individual must mate randomly (definitely not true), and there must be no selection pressures (unlikely, as I layed out above).

Realistically entropy will only start to become a problem in a few trillion years, and even after the last star dies in a 100 trillion years there are many feasible (and relatively low tech) ways to harvest energy from black holes.

I don't know about you, but I'll start worrying about the technical differences of a few trillion years and forever when I get there.

Those are certainly problems that would come up if we were immortal, but are those problems worse than a global genocide every generation (aka the current status quo)? I think we underplay how brutal of a tragedy death by aging is simply because it is universal, (currently) inevitable, and we have been desensitized to it over the lifespan of our species.

Another way to look at the tragedy of death by aging to consider this thought experiment:

Imagine tomorrow we all wake up and by magic everyone is immortal and ageless. All of the problems you brought up would immediately manifest. However, these problems could also be solved immediately if we euthanized everyone once they hit 100 years old. Naturally, all of these euthansions will be done to a perfectly healthy person and often against their will, but for this solution to work there can be no exceptions.

If this "solution" seems incredibly unethical to you then I don't know how you can look at the current status quo and deduce it is the better that people die of old age.

I am also curious to hear your reasoning behind your feelings that wanting eternal life is an egotistical attitude. Is it an egotistical attitude for a 20 year old to hope to live past their 50th year in good health? If not, why would it be egotistical for a healthy 50 year old to wish to maintain their health until they are 80? Or an 80 year old to wish the same for 120? And so on?

Someone's life does not lose value as they age. They are not any less of a person nor any less deserving of a healthy future just because they are a few decades older. The death of an 80 year old is just as tragic as the death of a 20 year old and in my opinion neither would be egotistical in wishing for a long, healthy, and happy future.

>Nevermind good or evil, the belief itself is flawed, and adopting it comes with baggage, such as presuppositions about what an "improvement" is and all that entails, such as notions of "inferiority".

I disagree with this assessment. Obviously the concept of self-improvement is not inherently flawed. Do you have the same objections to "improvement" when someone educates themselves, does brain excercises, learns a new skill, works out to improve their physique, or practices to improve their critical thinking skills? Do all of those actions carry so much baggage that the very belief that they may be worth doing is not viable?

That said, genetic manipulation does have some clear differences compared to something like working out. Due to the complexity of the system has more inherent risks, at least with our current understanding. It also has large potential societal impacts. People who have been successfully genetically engineered may have advantages over "wild-type" people to a degree similar to the advantages literare person has over an illiterate one.

These problems exist and should not be taken lightly, but are not reasons to dismiss the entire idea out of an appeal to naturalism or fear of unintended consequences. Any large change to our society (such as agriculture, reading and writing, or computers) will of course have unintended consequences, but that only means we should approach them with caution, not fear. We should not prohibit literacy because it may carry baggage.

I am also not sure I understand your appeal to natural selection as quoted below:

>The best we can hope to accomplish for the human race from our understanding of genetics and evolution, in my estimation, is perhaps limited to harnessing its problem-solving power in limited contexts. We can help people affected by genetic disorders, and hope for the best: that our medical advances in fact improve our evolutionary fitness as a species, but we have to remember that everything we do happens within a context of natural selection, including attempts to manipulate it, which may or may not have the intended effect on fitness, and failing to take that into consideration doesn't bode well for the positive outcome.

Natural selection and fitness literally just mean whoever has the most offspring. It makes no value judgements on what is good for the individual or society that individual lives in. As an extreme example, a serial rapist serving a life sentence in prison is likely more "fit" than a philosophy professor with a small but loving family. An individual's fitness is perhaps one of the worst metrics to determine if they are leading a "good" life.

Additionally we have already manipulated natural selection to an absurd degree just by changing our society. The modern world looks and behaves absolutely nothing like the world our ancestors evolved in for the last 200,000+ years. We are very poorly evolved for the our current circumstances. The fact that humans as a species have adapted as well as they have to such a rapidly changing environment is nothing short of remarkable considering we are trying to run 21st century society software on caveman hardware.

I'm not sure it is true that most people want to be the opposite of what they are, generally speaking.

Yes, most people are not 100% content with who they are and would like to change certain aspects of themselves, but that is sort of baked into the definition of want, no? If I want something it must, by definition, mean I do not have it. But most people also have many qualities about themselves that they do like. However they have no want for them because they already have them.

So when you only look at what people want it will of course seem like they want the opposite of themselves. But to get the full picture you also need to look at what they like about themselves and wouldn't change. And if you do that I think the assertion "that most people want to be the opposite of what they are" starts to fall apart.