You sound very confident that immortality would be a good thing.
Maybe.
We've never experienced it, so how can you be sure?
To be clear, I THINK my own immortality would be nice, but I can't even be sure about that. Immortality for EVERYONE would fundamentally change our societies. Every human institution is affected by death. Removing it would change everything, unpredictably.
If you can find an English version (or read Spanish), the Immortal by Borges is a good partial exploration of this theme, for an individual.
You sound very confident that immortality would be a bad thing.
Maybe.
We've never experienced it, so how can you be sure?
See, I just changed "good" to "bad" for you, because the question the way it is phrased suggests an opinion.
Personally, I see death as the equivalent of erasing hard drive full of valuable and interesting data. It's a shame people individual knowledge and experience are lost forever.
If as a society we can never come to agreement about immortality being good or bad, it would good to develop a technology to "save" knowledge and "load" it at will.
So when say an Einstein or a Feyman dies, their understand of the theories and technologies would become available for everyone to "download" in their brain - which hopefully would reduce wasted knowledge to a minimum.
Likewise, the same technology could free 15 year+ of a good life quality, currently spent on "education". It seems wasteful to me. Just load the knowledge in your brain, and skip school. Load "experience" too if you believe it is necessary.
A marked of "ideas" and "knowledge" ready to download in a brain. Wow. That would be a dream come true - even if immortality can't be achieved due to lack of consensus.
1. We already know what our society looks like with death.
2. It's easy to imagine the good things that come from a lack of death. We're more likely to underestimate downsides.
When dealing with a complex system, I'm skeptical of change. Following Nassim Taleb's ideas, the onus is on someone proposing a change to show that it will improve the system.
I don't want to die of cancer. I don't think anyone does. How far do I need to go to argue in favor of proposing a change in the form of cancer prevention and/or treatment?
I think I can inductively argue that given a set of possible ways of dying or becoming incapable there will always be one or more candidates which everyone would be happy to see eliminated.
There are going to be downsides to increased lifespans, but it's hard to imagine anyone convincingly arguing at any given point in the future "we need to stop increasing lifespans because it's just too hard to get parking spots/nice beachfront land/tenure". Let's suppose hard limits are placed on procreation to offset increasing lifespan, would that be enough? Any restriction which allows people to have one or fewer children each (let's call having a child the old-fashioned way counts as each person making 0.5 children) will cap population — advanced countries drop below replacement without legal enforcement already.
That's a different argument. I think it's the likeliest route to immortality, if we ever get there. There wouldn't ever be a 'immortality, yes or no' referendum.
What is the cost of 100,000 lives lost every day? [1]
If you have objections to agelessness through medicine, and many do, then it is probably a good idea to first consider the question above, and then consider your objection in the same terms.
I didn't say death is without cost. I said, eliminating death has bigger implications than we can imagine. It's certainly conceivable that the net effect would be negative.
The original post was phrased to the effect that anyone who thinks death has a purpose is a priori not just wrong, but very, very wrong.
Maybe.
We've never experienced it, so how can you be sure?
To be clear, I THINK my own immortality would be nice, but I can't even be sure about that. Immortality for EVERYONE would fundamentally change our societies. Every human institution is affected by death. Removing it would change everything, unpredictably.
If you can find an English version (or read Spanish), the Immortal by Borges is a good partial exploration of this theme, for an individual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_(short_story)