Metaphysics anyone?

[LutiChris]

However, I'd like to point out that leaving a legacy - passing down knowledge - is precisely what has allowed us to advance so much. Achievements today cannot have been accomplished without the foundation set in the past by our predecessors.

i'm not arguing that. leaving knowledge behind has helped us better understand and improve our living conditions. i'm saying the idea of living through your off spring is nonsensical. there must be a way to save our consciousness from escaping death.

Let me put it this way. When you can live forever, you have infinite time to do everything that can possibly be done for an infinite number of repetitions. Sooner or later, you'd know everything there is and have done everything there is; there is nothing that can surprise you or give you a sense of discovery or achievement since your vast experience effectively gives you 20/20 foresight. Unless you outright forget/erase your own memory and start all over, I'm pretty confident that you are going to be bored and take the easy way out.

fair enough. i did mention if we got bored that we would have to do something about it like changing our routine, life style, way of thinking, creating new experiences. The thing with memory is it's often a blur. Sometimes we forget we did something and do it anyways. We listen to the same songs sometimes, eat and sleep pretty much the same way. I wonder if a way to fight boredom would be to wash away or fragment our memories so that way we don't end up offing ourselves later. or maybe we'll just see each other kill ourselves and return to chaotic times. :P

In the same way, for a living creature to sustain its life beyond simply "existing", it would need some form of resource or sustenance to keep it going. As long as it is possible to cut off this resource, the living creature can die. That's why I believe it is impossible, or at least extremely improbable, that death can truly be conquered.

so lets figure out what life is.

Living things avoid decay into disorder and equilibrium

since all our cells are like little machines (that don't experience or feel anything)
it has the properties that we assign to life

it has a wall that separates it from its surroundings (creating order)
it regulates itself and maintains a constant state
it eats stuff to stay alive
it grows and develops
it reacts to the environment
it's subject to evolution
and it makes copies of itself

but everything that makes up a cell, isn't alive. it just reacts chemically with other stuff over and over again. we're basically a bunch of dead matter moved by the laws of the universe.

eventually every living thing will die. the goal of the process is to prevent this by producing new entities, with new strands of dna and hope for a mutation that will let us survive the current outside state of our surroundings

life is just a lot of stuff that carries genetic information around. every living thing is subject to evolution and the dna that develops the best living thing around it will stay in the game

dna is a very complex micro machine but it can't do anything by itself. then we have viruses. they are strings of dna/rna and need cells to do something. and to this day we don't know if they count as living or dead. there's also some viruses like the cyanovirus that invade dead cells and reanimate them so they can be a host for them.

we're often said that we as a species act like a virus, so why not get passed the process and blur the lines for us to stay in the game?

back in the day, billions of years ago...
our oldest ancestor were probably mitochondria. they are the power plants in most complicated cells and were previously free living bacteria that entered a partnership with bigger cells like eukariotes.

they still have their own dna and can multiply on their own but they are not alive anymore, they're dead. they basically traded their own life for the survival of their dna

which means living things can evolve into dead things as long as its beneficial to their genetic code. so is life just information that manages to ensure its continued existence?

lets jump into AI, it's just a question of time before the technology we build gets there. it may seem like science fiction but it's not. we've got a lot of smart scientists and everyday programmers that are working on this.

btw check out the movie Ex Machina if you haven't already!

life in summary is just things, processes, dna, and information?
one thing is for sure, life is not fundamentally different from nonliving things.

we don't contain some nonphysical element or are governed by different principles in inanimate objects to be alive like we once thought thousands of years ago. there's nothing special or magical about us. we are like every living being, a product of evolution. we're learning more about what computers can do and how life works so the closer we get to creating the first machine that fits our description of life the more of our image of ourselves is in danger again. im sure it'll happen sooner or later. when we get to that point and mind upload our consciousness (if thats possible) or build complicated machines to replace every cell in our body we'll basically be like automated gods.

if everything in the universe is made up of the same stuff does this mean everything in the universe is dead or alive? is it a question of complexity? does this mean we can never die because we were never alive in the first place? is life and death an irrelevant question and we haven't noticed it yet? is it possible we are much more part of the universe around us than we thought?