Mindscape Holiday Message 2023 | Reflections on Immortality

Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
The final Mindscape podcast of each year is devoted to a short, reflective Holiday Message. This year the theme is Immortality: whether it's an attractive idea, and whether the laws of physics and cosmology would allow for it in principle. (Spoiler: they do not.) Mindscape will return as usual on January 1, 2024. Happy holidays everyone!
Mindscape Podcast playlist: • Mindscape Podcast
Sean Carroll channel: / seancarroll
#podcast #ideas #science #philosophy #culture

[@ModusOperandi2009]

I'd absolutely take 10,000 years, or even more! Maybe it's my religious upbringing, but the prospect of a longer or infinite (healthy) lifespan, whether on a paradise Earth or in Heaven, has always seemed just obviously good to me. As Sean said, there is so much out there to *do*. I'm about halfway through my life at this point, and so far, it's been great! I also see it as a sort of calculus/limit function: If the average healthy lifespan limit is now ~80 years, would you like to live twice as long in good health? Most people would probably say yes. What about three times as long? Ten times? A hundred times? Trying to find that limit exposes how arbitrary is the 80 years that we've been given. I don't see how I could get bored in this universe. Sure, it could be a struggle to continually find meaning in existence. But if I failed, I could just end it, right? At least I wouldn't be tethered to my biological lifespan.

[@WajihSalem]

How much people loved the researcher and scientists💖

[@user-ph9cu9jo8y]

I always wanted to live thousands of years in order to watch the progress of science and technology. A friend of mine (he died in 1996) and I discussed such things over pizza every Friday evening. I often think about all the things he was interested in but is now missing out on - humanoid robots, landing rovers on Mars, JWST, AI, all the Sci-fi movies (he loved Blade Runner), CRISPR, Tesla, smart phones, etc. On a different note, in the Arthur C, Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama series one of the main characters has a very interesting discussion about mortality with the alien makers of the space vessel.

[@davegrundgeiger9063]

I think you mean the "Octospiders." They had a very different view of mortality. Their interest was in survival of the species, rather than of the individual. And I think that makes a lot of sense. We here now come from an unbroken process of life since the beginning of life.

[@twonumber22]

I'll be happy if I make it to 50. Living for hundreds of years seems like torture.

[@kx4532]

Carl Sagan 😢

[@simesaid]

I'm sorry about your friend. That we get to experience _anything_ through being alive is an indescribably beautiful gift. That this experience must end so abruptly, though, forever... is infinitely sad.

[@simesaid]

​@twonumber22 you won't think that when you are, like me, one month off reaching that mark. Having 20 or 30 years of life left until you die is a _very_ different thing than when you only have 20 or 30 _days!_

[@ragnarosthefirelord8662]

I'd refuse the 10,000 year pill personally - Borges and others have made the compelling case to me that our senses of self aren't built for substantially more than a natural human lifespan. Always interested to hear the various perspectives of Sean and his guests. Happy Holidays!

[@twonumber22]

I think these people wanting to live forever haven't really thought it through.

[@Amethyst_Friend]

Merry Christmas, Sean and everyone.

[@hibou-cool]

The primary driving force behind my desire to live for 10,000 years lies not in personal pursuits or experiences, but in the profound curiosity to witness the future explorations and discoveries of humanity. Imagining the revolutionary advancements that may reshape our perspectives-unraveling the mysteries of consciousness, achieving multi-planetary existence, and comprehending the fundamental laws of the universe.

[@mimidhof2179]

Thank you. Very nice thought about what live time really means. Mery Christmas and Happy New Year Sean. All the best for 2024.

[@orthoplex64]

I want to live as long as possible. _Definitely_ at least 10,000 years; preferably trillions and beyond. I don't think I would become bored or insane, but even so, being those things would be better than not being at all.

[@kx4532]

I know right I haven't even learned the math.

[@johncarter1150]

I think you misunderstand the reality

[@blanias175]

This thinking got me into massive depression man. It’s just our ego thinking we’re important enough to deserve to live that long. We probably shouldn’t

[@kx4532]

@@blanias175 Are you kidding? There's the real possibility that the greater universe is infinite and that the chances that life happens at all could be so remote that it only occurs every 10^100 times the span of the visible portion of the universe. You might be it. One of the best most intelligent things in the accessible/visible universe that we can have causal contact with. This makes you special. Also you can grow too! (* the value is toung and cheak)

[@StayPrimal]

Happy Holidays Professor and everyone in the chat :) Be good to yourself you deserve it.

[@Life_42]

I would definitely love for 10,000 years if given the option! More time to learn and come up with new ideas!

[@astee58]

Happy holidays! I like the message too!

[@fasligand7034]

What an inspiring message, Sean. Thank you.

[@robertmolldius8643]

Yes, I also want to live for 10,000 years. I am far too curious to miss such an opportunity. Think how many opportunities open up, how much knowledge you can take in. One might even be able to go to Alfa Centauri.

[@37rmstrong]

My favorite podcast of the year! Loved it.

[@k9bfriender672]

I'd opt for a 10,000 year lifespan, but I think it would get lonely if I were the only one. The melancholy of an immortal doesn't come from the loss of loved ones, but from the fear of forgetting them. Loneliness and melancholy aside, I don't think I'd ever get bored.

[@TamarZiri]

Provided peak physical & mental health I think living forever is a great idea. We won't be chained to Earth, we will be able to travel around the galaxy, meet other life forms and have time to get to all those incredible places. I want alien friends. Gimme!

[@tylerjmast]

I very much feel the opposite, I feel I'd be more likely to do all the things I think I'd like to do if allotted infinite time. Having to choose one thing, and the knowledge I only have time enough to work towards a tiny fraction of what I'd like to get up to makes me feel overwhelmed by the endless number of options and thus paralyzed, yet being limited to a mere thousandth of what I'd like to do makes it easier to accept failing even that meager goal, or even doing none of it since zero and a thousandth are both essentially equal and equidistant from one anyway.

[@op4000exe]

My mantra of life has always been, I will live forever (figuratively, not true immortality, but long enough that I can experience all that I might want to experience), or die trying.

[@LearnedSome]

Happy Holidays!

[@bryandraughn9830]

During mediation one day I experienced a kind of "infinite void". It was extraordinary because I felt as if i had been a part of it forever and always will be. The thing that surprised me was that i had an infinite perspective from every moment instead of a linear view. In that moment I could see the totality of infinity. Another surprising thing i noticed was that at some point, i had decided to "touch" the earth, which accounted for my entire life span on this planet. Using words is almost pointless to describe the experience. It was very reassuring and interesting. Im not making any assumptions about it being "real" or anything like that. The "me" that was doing the experiencing was a much larger individual. Kind of.

[@GoatOfTheWoods]

What a pleasant surprise. Happy holidays, everyone!

[@musbiq]

Of course immortality is a good idea! I don't need to philosophize or think too much on it; I wanna live forever. 😉

[@coreyleander7911]

My only hope is that we live in an ocean of bubble universes (perhaps with each collision setting off or stopping inflation), and that one day we may advance enough to manipulate negative energy and create traversable wormholes so that we might leave our universe altogether.

[@leedb1]

Many lives are already hell for a few decades, I think you need to be extremely lucky to be in a position where you are hopeful enough of your future to want 10k years of it.

[@anthonyward8805]

I always wonder if after we die, we survive as blips of Boltzmann brains, moment by moment, throughout time. And what that experience might be like

[@ajosin]

Our surviving consciousness will be in the inmortality branch of many worlds. Therefore, it will be experienced in the future. That situation is indistinguishable from ME experiencing inmortality. THEREFORE, in a very tangible way, I will experience immortality according to many worlds (+ assuming my felt experience is indistinguible from any other felt experience of my conciousness among the many worlds branches). Right?

[@davegrundgeiger9063]

Even if stipulating that we are finite, I don't think that matters when we can interact with and be changed by an infinite universe. We may be finite, but our space of possible future selves isn't.

[@cosmiclettuce]

I'd simply like to **choose** my lifespan -- instead of biology, or culture, or something else limiting me to *one* pretty boring choice (which of course is no choice at all!)

[@OBGynKenobi]

We are only immortal for a limited time. --Neil Peart

[@yonaoisme]

this is a semantically meaningless statement. you also derive no insight from it whatsoever

[@OBGynKenobi]

@@yonaoisme Jesus dude, lighten up. Open yourself up to poetry and its subtexts.

[@yonaoisme]

@@OBGynKenobi there is no subtext to this quote. that's what i just said (within subtext, if you will)

[@Garenop]

I agree. This one had me cringe a little

[@mahneh7121]

Would you agree that: We are only rich for a limited time ~Mah Neh ?

[@Gedis2x]

Can you really run out of things to do if your memory is not perfect?

[@spaceinyourface]

Ceremony of forgetting ,,I think I've subliminally been doing that for a while,, with people actually still alive !!

[@spinningaround]

I want to live for 10,000 years just to see what Sean Carroll is going to do.

[@gerrycrabtree3274]

I think the uncertainty principle would preclude reaching maximum entropy

[@vicenzor3625]

How long would I have to work?

[@AvoidRunningAtAllTimes]

Professor, have you ever spoken on or with anyone about Terence McKenna and his “novelty theory”? Would be great to hear your thoughts on it in general.

[@2CSST2]

I'm not at all convinced by the argument that if you lived forever, you wouldn't be motivated to do anything because you know you can do it anytime. That's only a part of what drives our motivation in normal mortal lives, take that away and there are still many reasons left. Think about this one: Imagine as an immortal human you put your hand on a hot stove and you feel the agony. You're telling me, because you're immortal so you'll be free of this agony someday and forever after that anyway, might as well keep the hand there for a little while more. That makes absolutely no sense to me, I think people get a bit stunned by the concept of immortality and lose common sense when thinking about it. Avoiding pain will always be a motivation, but the pursuit of pleasure as well. For someone to actually lose all motivation to do anything, what you need is not immortality, but an unending state of bliss. NOW you have no reason to pursue anything.

[@ModusOperandi2009]

Well said.

[@jordenflorence5294]

After a googleplex years passed even you would be laying naked on the stove just for the buzz...... With still all eternity to go

[@EinsteinsHair]

@@jordenflorence5294 When Google was named they misspelled googol. You would think they could have looked it up on Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, or Alta Vista. I know. My mind is full of useless information.

[@kx4532]

It should be not getting old, not being indestructible for infinite time and then being trapped in a black hole.

[@onlynormalperson]

As an ADHD addled depressed millennial I already have no sense of time and much in the way of a sense of personal identity so I guess immortality wouldn't change me much other than maybe exacerbating my sense of nihilism

[@sashakindel3600]

In the quantum immortality argument, I don't see how one can posit that a branch of the wave function where one remains alive will always exist. Does the idea that everything that is possible on a quantum level actually happens imply in some obvious way that every macroscopic state one can imagine also actually happens? Maybe some imaginable macroscopic states are outside what can be reached by evolving our universe's wave function.

[@haydenhuggins2162]

Hi Sean, You say that Ted Chang argues that immortality was bad due to stagnation and that young people/new ideas were needed. Then bring up the idea that this is bad due to continued need to replicate ad infinitum etc. I think this position is not entirely relevant, based on the fact that I can easily imagine a society where some are immortal (stagnating) while others are not (idea generating). Thoughts? Actually, that’s a decent idea for a story…

[@obi5402]

💚 Sean Carroll the Kermit the frog of quantum mechanics.

[@mahneh7121]

limit concepts, nice idea.

[@JonnyD000]

This idea that I'm about to put forward is probably wrong because of my ignorance on how universe are tied to space-time. But in the picture of the universe given at the end of the podcast, we refer to our baby universe as a universe, but the term universe referring to all that is would refer to the larger whatever that is having field fluctuations and giving birth to new baby universes. Couldn't there be multiple baby universes happening at once, just potentially at unimaginable distances away from each other that they never meet? And if that were the case, if we could ever find a way to hop from baby universe to baby universe we could keep civilization going.

[@HarryNicNicholas]

the real problem is resources, like at the moment i can't move house, so ONE more year in this place will drive me bananas, but let me explore my planet, then my solar system, and then the galaxy - i think i could fill a few thousand years, and of course i'd like my eyesight, my teeth, my lungs and my hearing back....

[@philliplc]

Don't want immortality but would take the 10000 years. As it is it takes the majority of our lives to really mature and figure out who we are, not leaving enough time to enjoy that fully.

[@garydecad6233]

So if Homo sapiens were immortal, would we remember our past historical disasters that we created, and eventually have a nirvana as a result ( I.e. would history ‘not repeat?’)

[@kx4532]

When you play it dangerously, the universe starts having degenerate less likely things start happening, like all the people buying into the guy from home alone and making him their king.

[@philliplc]

Prison of the lost Xanadu

[@dang495]

I read immorality. So disappointed the subject is immortality!😂

[@FABRIZIOZPH]

I couldn't care less about living forever...

[@phenghs2007]

I've already lived too long. Tired of being here lol

[@EB-cp4sr]

So after 10k years, when you live happily and 100% healthy and strong, you would say to yourself now I want to die?

[@EinsteinsHair]

Was "happily" one of the guarantees? There are probably plenty who would sign up for another 10k, but if the last few centuries were boring, you had done everything you wanted, there was not much to look forward to, then many would likely decide to finish out this one and be done.

[@tvinforest5255]

You were in minority voting to live longer in a room of scientists - that's grim. Thank you for your podcast and for thinking that being alive longer is good - sadly not so popular opinion in a society.

[@DerekFullerWhoIsGovt]

I always believed perfect balance was a death equivalent and unbalance was needed for life.

[@davegrundgeiger9063]

"I don't want to live forever, but I do want to live for 10,000 years." -- Sean. I think that if today-Sean can imagine fruitfully living for 10,000 years, then a 10,000-year-old Sean will have developed into being able to imagine living fruitfully for a million years, etc. You could even say that kind of development is what the universe has been doing since its inception. 10 billion years ago it didn't have the capacity to imagine living at all. But here we are, imagining and living qualitatively new things.

[@OBGynKenobi]

I would argue that your wave function is not you. Your wave function doesn't know about your friends or that memory of 30 years ago, etc...

[@FrankMerton]

Even if one is immortal, one will never have actually lived an infinite time. One may be a million billion years old, but that is far short of infinity. Therefore, even though our possibilities my be finite, so also will be our actual time, and in a spacially or temorally infinite, it can always be presenting new possibilities. I think, then, that your pessissism on that point is incorrect.

[@JAYMOAP]

We humans are laplaces demons ;)) nice one Sean

[@PicaMula]

Will society survive for another thousand years? I'm noy optimistic about that.

[@fkzgfk]

Surprisingly uninspiring podcast about very inspiring topic

[@raheemdavis776]

The big joke will be when the veil is lifted and just like a dream you wake up realizing the whole dream was made out of your own mind (unity) and that you don’t know the concept of ending in terms of the dream world in relation to you the dreamer.

[@walkingcarpet420]

You know all the billionaires are seeking a way to live forever

[@johnjordan6032]

This whole concept is based on the incorrect assumption that we are our bodies. The bag of meat and dimension we are currently residing in is just temporary, and to talk about biologically preserving that body "forever" is just silly.

[@frtillmanYT]

You observe a "Holiday" what is "that"? Why use the word "Holiday"? What is etymology of word "Holiday"?

[@ahad2k11]

Why is it always human BEINGS. I think he says human BEINGS at least 30 times. Why not just say humans?