John Klein wrote: > A surprisingly large amount of human culture is based around death and the > preparations for it. Who knows what it would be replaced by if death > weren't an issue, or if it happened less frequently? Note that this is a separate issue, related more to cultural/social issues and the perception of death, rather than to the experience of indefinite life. > @> We do, after all, live in the present. > And this is just plain wrong. Is it really? Care to back that up with some evidence? Psychological disorders aside, we do indeed live in the present, as it's simply not possible to live any other way. Even when we're trying to live in the past or future, we're only deluding ourselves; the actions we take are based in the _present_. > @> Personally, I think that someone who dislikes the idea of living a very, very > @> long time (essentially forever) is either in a lot of pain or is simply very > @> unimaginative. I've been the former but never the latter. :-) > Depends. Presumably you're talking about the "don't shrivel up and turn > into a cricket" variety of immortality, which is difficult to believe in. Um, what? I don't think there's really any other kind of indefinite life extension. It seems pretty clear from the current mass of knowledge that aging is in fact what would have to be prevented (i.e. "cured") in order to provide that indefinite life. > Then there are problems with memory; is there a larger storage capacity? No, of course not. But the human brain, while not _infinitely_ so, is quote flexible indeed. Certain memories would survive, others would of course not survive. That's why we have writing, right? > And how much point is > there in living a thousand years if you can only remember a hundred of > them? Well, I suspect that we would be able to remember a bit more than that, but this is an issue that can't be decided, or even addressed, until we know a bit more about just how the brain actually stores memories and what the brain's "capacity" for such storage might be, or even if that question makes any real sense. -- Frank Mayhar frank at exit.com http://www.exit.com/ Exit Consulting http://www.gpsclock.com/ http://www.exit.com/blog/frank/