The False Horror of Immortality

2 and a half thousand years ago the first emperor of China died drinking an Elixir his court Alchemist promised would Grant him immortality a fate several more Emperors would share in his wake in another world a chosen Undead chooses to link the flame in hopes of staving off Humanity's Decay a little while longer in 1535 a Spanish Court chronicler writes of a Mythic quest to find the Fountain of Youth in 1947 Argentine author Jorge Lou boes writes of a man seeking out the city of the Immortals only to find it full of impossible architecture and populated by dull childlike creatures he calls troit in 1990 almost 3 million people died not from tuberculosis but from a lack of Medical Care in 2014 tech billionaire Peter teal declares his intention to be cryogenically frozen on his deathbed in hopes of being reanimated in a future where he might live forever in 2019 my grandfather died after a long fight against his neurological condition in 17776 humans immune to aging play football forever in a far-flung future an artist Paints the Sky with a color from deep in his Immortal past and a society of digital humans delete themselves from existence the Quest for immortality is perhaps the oldest story Humanity has but does it mean forever evolving or forever decaying death has always been two steps behind but we might just be about to outrun it and it begs the question should we and is this really about our fear of death or something [Music] deeper almost every from software game is in one way or another fundamentally about Decay about attempting to forall it and death and the cost of doing so this is most literal in syuro where you the player can live forever but only by spreading the dragon rot to other people around you which will in time kill them a blight on the land itself living not on borrowed but stolen time or consider the decay of immortality in Dark Souls where Humanity's true form is as the hollows creatures liking will and emotions who also happen to be of all things Immortal the age of fire prevents Humanity from lapsing back into this form and the fundamental choice at the end of the game is whether to continue the age of fire while Hollows have a kind of bodily physical immortality like you do in siko Hollows are also creatures of disconnection isolation echoed in the game's mechanics the closer to hollow you are the less other players and characters can interact with your game Hollows are unable to build the Great Empires like the one we see the ghosts of in the game World shells of who they once were like in siko you can acquire immortality but only at the cost of yourself of those around you of the civilization you have built this theme continues in Elden ring where after the Rune of death was removed people began living unnaturally long lives while Miyazaki describes the immortality of the deig Gods themselves as quote stemming from having their f deaths removed from the Elden ring fate being something intentional natural designed in both siko and Elden ring immortality is presented as a circumvention of natural even Divine Law things not meant to be tampered with while Dark Souls curiously presents immortality as Humanity's Natural State here that is only because Decay is the natural state of things and we defy it by living on refusing our Decay by holding on to our mortality nothing lasts for rever from soft Whispers not you not I an immortal thing is a hollow thing a tarnished thing like this place about me a ruined thing death is a curiously humanizing force in these stories and perhaps nobody demonstrates that bitter than saith the scales saith the scales is a boss from Dark Souls a dragon whose desperate pursuit of immortality leads him to mutilate his body and fall down the path of madness he obsesses of ancient knowledge locks himself away in his Tower his quest leading him to experiment on others forcing them to be a dragon children all in hopes he might discover sails which can confer on him immortality he even eventually creates a new kind of tortured life here it is not immortality itself which corrupts you and the world about you but your pursuit of it because these stories are so often about Obsession Obsession which controls you changes you the deeply human addiction to something you can taste but will never have this is Envy drawn out despite his love of knowledge and learning Seth's library is ruined by this vast crystalline infection which has taken over everything in his Pursuit if sa story reminds you of anything it's because this is Dark Souls Frankenstein a man whose Obsession which destroys him was also originally about you guessed it immortality wealth was an inferior object but what Glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death the fear of an obsession with staving off decay can ultimately destroy anything worth preserving especially when it Clos itself in glory and good eclipsing any moral boundaries you once had these stories Force us to ask ourselves if it really came down to it what would you do to preserve your life what would you sacrifice what decay would you succumb to it's one of those questions we cannot know the answer to till we ever have to try but history is full of people trying the first emperor of China sini hang was famously terrified of death obsessed with trying to find a way to avoid it his fear made him gullible and wise susceptible to snake oil salesman trying to sell him false elixir of life in one account the man called sufu promised he could bring back a herb from an island of the Immortals if only the emperor gave him a ton of money and 500 virgin boys and girls they never returned but like Seth his obsession also made him cruel in his later years he ordered 460 of his CT Alchemists buried alive supposedly for not making enough progress on his immortality until Legend goes his desire ultimately killed him a poisoned elixir in the age of alchemy Alchemist spent fortunes and lifetimes consumed in their Quest trying to create the philosopher stone once like paracelsus even claimed to have done it Alchemists were obsessed with the idea that substances like Mercury of all things were magical they were both solids and liquids and in the special properties they end up drinking it using it sentencing themselves and others to an early death not unlike the Nobles of Saro or the Demag gods of Elden ring or Seth of Dark Souls it is not immortality which leads to moral and personal Decay but our obsession with it I know I can be prone to Obsession if something really takes me I can lock myself away for days I won't eat I won't drink I'll barely sleep I will neglect to myself and others my relationships caught up in the ambition and hyperfixation like Seth and Frankenstein and since shiang how many times has Obsession consumed you the curse of obsession is that it can Eclipse everything we are until eventually it becomes who we are and what greater Obsession does Humanity have than not dying as venture capitalist and immortality quester Brian Johnson puts it the only objective we have is don't die but if one day our Obsession leads to an elixir of life it begs the question who should get to drink it in Greg Egan's permutation City people can copy their minds over and over into a digital world becoming extensions of you throughout this digital framework they offer digital immortality but many of the copies in permutation City are not just your average person who wants to live forever they are billionaires dying from terminal illness who go on to live their next best life in VR these worlds are not only sustained by trust funds huge fortunes they built up throughout their lives but they suck up much of the world's computing power as a real resource just to keep them alive on the other hand poor copies live in Virtual slums slow clubs forced to run at slower speeds and tossed around to whoever can afford to keep them even Frozen or put on hold until living itself is Affordable again an immortal thing is an expensive thing and currency is life in Egan's world not only the quality of life you live but the length of it can be bought we see a similar theme in Richard Morgan's altered carbon where Humanity has figured out how to live forever by storing your mind on what they call a stack at the base of your neck you can upload your mind to a new body over and over like a USB only the technology isn't available to everyone because of course it isn't only the uber wealthy methus can afford it like the poor copies live in the virtual slow clubs the Methuselah live forever in their nigh heav L Estates while the poor live and more importantly die in squala these stories too are about Decay Egan and Morgan ask us to look at radical life extension not as a magical hypothetical or philosophical question but as a practical reality because if immortality is to exist it will not be some rejuvenating natural magical water like anuro or a magical Rune like an Elden ring it will be a tangible invented real technology to be bought and sold something people have stakes in shares in with quarterly predictions and profit margins something people can own control the world's most valuable Subscription Service a resource and commodity and luxury you live that long things start happening to you you get too impressed with yourself ends up you think you're God suddenly the little people 30 maybe 40 years old well they don't really matter anymore you've seen whole societies rise and fall and you start to feel your standing outside at all and none of it really matters to you and maybe you'll start snuffing those little people just like Picking Daisies if they get under your feet they deal with Humanity the way you and I deal with insect life where secura's Decay comes from the existential role death plays in us or sath or Frankenstein's moral Decay is deeply rooted in their Obsession permutation City in Altered carbon invite us to look at immortality's Decay as something sociological anthropological another way for society itself to Decay as wealth and power are further concentrated in the hands of the few and trenching the systems which already exist stagnation if this sounds hypothetical well in 2016 the sulk Institute for biological studies managed to extend the life of a mouse by 30% and reversed the signs of aging in human and mels in vitro mice share 85% of our genetics they did this in part by activating genes which have the capacity to convert adult cells back to an embryonic like State slowly more and more we are identifying the real tangible causes of aging and death and Circ conventing them the most valuable pharmaceutical drug ever made and the most inelastic good an economist could ever imagine a monopoly to die for but much of this research is funded by billionaires like Henry bofur owner of the French pharmaceutical company Ipson or Yuri Miller Robert Nelson Peter teal who has poured Millions into of all names the methusa foundation and they don't just do it out of the good of their hearts famously TIG billionaire Brian Johnson can sell you his magical pills set one I'm sure Emperor sashin Kuan would have paid through the nose for for just $420 a year or get 5% off with your subscription fee in 2014 Peter teal announced he would amongst other billionaires be cryogenically frozen on his deathbed for a measly $200,000 or just $80,000 if you're only interested in the head none of this says it'll work but I think kelu said it best in her short story The Orchard of tomorrow it's a guarantee that they'll stay eternal stay in power a gift for those who already have everything unless we stop it inhumanity starts with intense inequality here like the hollows of Dark Souls the immortality of the Methuselah is a life of disconnection a lack of perspective in the case of permutation City they literally inhabit a different world people like this become literally physically metaphorically and morally disconnected from the rest of humanity especially because of immortality is something which can be bought and sold then living longer becomes a choice and if it's a choice then it's your fault for not living longer for not working hard enough you deserve what you've got it's easy to get caught up in this concept of deserving like it's an easy rationale for why the world does not need to change but it always obscures more complex realities tuberculosis has been around in one form or another for 150 million years it kills by attacking the lungs it starts with chest pain then of vicious cough night sweats then over the years it slowly destroys your organs so systematically that we still find the scars of it on bodies from thousands of years ago tuberculosis killed 1.3 million people in 2022 alone more than covid more than malaria more than HIV Charles Dickens once described it as a disease Which medicine never cured wealth never watered off or poverty could boast exemption from but slow or quick is ever sure and certain only that isn't true revolutionary technologies have allowed us to diagnose and treat TB effectively for years now and this revolutionary technology is even available across the world for anyone who can afford it 80% of TB deaths occur now in low or middle- inome countries while only 2% occur in North America or Europe to the wealthiest countries in the world tuberculosis is virtually no more real than small poox is a disease Humanity eradicated some decades ago there's something ironic in US pouring billions into this magical uncertain holy technological Grail elixir of life when radical life extension for Millions is already real we just refuse to pay for it one study estimates that even survivors of TB lose a decade of life with their increased mortality not to mention the 1.3 million who never see the collective millions of years of life between them something immortality research could only hope to imitate sci-fi is so often a cautionary tale something that's meant to happen in the future if things aren't going well but we already live in a world where wealth separates you from a longer life we already live in the autov verse of permutation City the corporation Daner responsible for much of the Revolutionary technology able to diagnose and treat TB records massive profits year on year but only because they drive the price up with a 300% markup inhumanity starts with inequality again while dhood did lower the price of one TB test by 20% in respons recent pressure they did not lower it for the more vital kind of test for the more deadly strains of TB nor many of the other necessary technologies that could save lives Decay here is not something that happens to us outside of our control Decay is something we allow to happen it's decay in the fabric of society itself like many new technologies radical life extension has the capacity to make the cracks already in society bigger cracks where the decay can seep through if we let it but if that's the case is immortality really a bad thing is it really one of those we kept asking whether we could rather than whether we should things or are we just trying to make living with death easier is death really a fundamental part of being human and is moving beyond the human a bad thing and to answer that I need to tell you about jge L bis's impossible City [Music] in his story The Immortal bore his rights of a man seeking out the legendary city of the Immortals only to find it full of grotesque nonsense architecture upside down staircases leading to deadly shafts designs which make no geometric sense just looking at them a city he writes so horrific that its mere existence pollutes the past and the future more than that he finds it populated by these trites who appear mindless immature slow only to learn they are in fact the final form of the Immortals he has been seeking there is no more complex pleasure than thought and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over taught by centuries of living the Republic of immortal men had achieved a Perfection of Tolerance almost of disdain they knew that over an infinitely long span of time all things happen to all men I know of men who have done evil in order that good may come of it in future centuries or may have already come of it in centuries past viewed in that way all our acts are just though also unimportant there are no spiritual or intellectual merits no one is someone a single Immortal man is all men like Cornelius Agrippa I am God hero philosopher demon and World which is a long- winded way of saying that I'm not there is a lot to unpack here but do you remember that old thought experiment about how a monkey with a typewriter given infinite time would eventually create the entire works of Shakespeare word for word line for line beat for beat in chronological order well if that's the case then is writing Shakespeare's to be or not to be all that impressive someone's going to do it eventually when bores writes of how in eternity all things happen to all men he's not only saying how eventually everyone would write a Shakespearean Masterpiece even if by chance but eventually we would all become morally equivalent having done enough good things and bad things to just look on the world and each other with disdain everyone as he says a god a hero a philosopher demon and world or in other words we would Decay to become nobody at all aim not after all is that not the fate of these ponderous troit they have decayed into nobodies are they not unlike the hollows of dark souls for boy his the decay of immortality is not just immorality but apathy regression to the mean to sameness like the ash Nobles or Seth the scalas or the methus or the richet copies everything unique in us will Decay to a shell of what we once were it's not just death that gives us perspective or the ability to create great things but only in our finitude can we Define ourselves in our moral and social value when time is scarce our choices become valuable but then you ask what of the impossible City they built for bores Infinity would see us lose any Wonder Joy interest we have in the world hence why the trites have retreated into thought the last complex experience they have he mentions how occasionally extremely unusual physical experiences like the smell of rain at dawn might cut through the monotony but the city was a last ditch effort to maintain interest in the world constructing a place so bizarre so complex so unearthly so unnatural they might find something stimulating just in trying to navigate it but it doesn't work this story like all the rest is ultimately about Decay just of a different kind decay of identity of meaning in ality just guarantees that the age of fire ends an immortal thing is a meaningless thing in 1926 chick composer Carl kic wrote an opera called the mupo case it recounts the story of a woman Elina who has granted immortality in 300-year increments able to renew it each time she chooses by drinking an alchemical Elixir if this sounds familiar it's because Neil gim and shears an almost identical setup to the character of harby gadling a man granted immortality in 100-year increments like Alina having to decide whether to continue on each time in both of these stories unlike B his the choice to live on is more important a choice we all have to make how long do we live with that decay there's an escape hatch built in only these two stories diverge in one important way hob chooses to extend his life several times over proclaiming death is a mugs game whereas Elina reaching the end of just her first 300-year life chooses to accept death claiming only mortality gives us a sense of transcendence and purpose oh life should not last so long for you everything makes sense for you everything has its value for the trivial chance reason that you are going to die so soon but in me life has come to a halt what a hideous Solitude and one comes to learn that the soul has died inside one this is not unlike hob ging's final moments in the Sandman comic where having lived through the centuries he finds himself disconnected from the world he now inhabits I used to think death was a big sudden thing like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off I think it's a slow thing like a thief who comes into your house day after day taking a little thing here and a little thing there and one day you walk around your house and there's nothing to keep you nothing to make you want to stay and then you lie down and shut up forever lots of little deaths until the last big one even though these are both more grounded depictions it is hard not to see boris's Immortal here hob has been a slaver a slave a noble a poor man a widower a murderer he has been everything achieved everything being all men and now feels little for the world in the end he returns to this old Renaissance Tavern curiously like the one he started and seeking out perhaps some feeling like the chocolit did in their impossible Labyrinth his line about suffering a lot of little deaths reflects bz's own that immortality only multiplies a man's deaths and what is Decay if not the slow death of a thousand things like the trites Elena and hob Retreat into themselves into the past into Nostalgia for a large part of my life Doctor Who was everything it's honestly difficult for me to communicate to put into words just how transformative that story and that series was for me and who I am and how I look on the world I've tried to put it into into words so many times but I can't I have gone back and back and held on to the series for so long I have followed it and enjoyed it but so much of that is trying to recapture the magic of that part of my life of what that story meant to me and yet knowing that I can never go back to that I can never have that again and I don't know if I ever will I hope that I will or I hope that I'll find it somewhere else but I don't know if I ever will how often as an adult have you tried to recapture some specific Joy you had as a child some wonder you seem to have lost or maybe something inside you decayed that prevents you from enjoying it the same way you used to anymore maybe it's so wrapped up in how new it was at the time how we were at the time and so we go searching we look for bigger better more extreme experien hoping to mimic hoping to recapture that magic and yet at some point it never gets as good as it was the time before as it was reading that book playing that game and crying yourself to sleep at 2 a.m. as playing Dungeons and Dragons with that group of people as loving that person and so we beat back boats against the current born ceaselessly back into the past there's a reason that even as we grow old we listen to the music from our youth that as time moves on a part of us remains in the past till eventually all of us is and with that we get stretched too thin like butter scraped over too much bread Copic suggest this can happen in as little as three centuries GA in maybe a thousand or so bores even more but they all promise it will happen that life is sand slipping through our fingers we desperately try to mold into the shape of something we can believe in but eventually we can't see anything in it at all we think we're telling stories about an endless future but we're really telling stories about the realization that as we grow a part of us remains in the one place we can never return to the past and how long can you bear the weight of that an immortal thing is a nostalgic thing and so some of them argue we should not seek out immortality at all but like how much of this is really true how much of this is you know cope the idea of death as a natural moral even important part of human existence goes back a long way Socrates even suggested once that death might be the greatest blessing that can ever happen to man so don't temper with it too much from soft suggests there is something indefinably existentially human about coexisting with death but Humanity has a long history of trying to moralize terrifying realities we cannot control and have to live with natural disasters pain and childbirth disease it's easier to deal with if it feels morally deserved or part of some justice in the grand scheme of things would immortality really deprive us of meaning and Identity or is this just us going gently into that good night when everything demands that we should rage rage when you take a step back and think about it it sounds almost paradoxical to say death somehow makes life more meaningful than living more could in fact existentialist philosopher Jean Paul SRA even goes as far to say that death is the killer of any meaning we have death is never that which gives life its meanings it is on the contrary that which on principle removes all meaning from life if we must die then our life has no meaning because its problems receive no solution and because the very meaning of the problems remains undetermined death confers a meaning from the outside on everything which I live in subjectivity death reaps all this subjective which while it lived defended itself against exteriorization and death deprives it of all subjective meaning in order to hand it over to any objective meaning which the other is pleased to give it the final value of my conduct remains forever in suspense any we find for oursel necessarily deteriorates after we die it is left in Ruins we cannot control what other people say or do about us what they read into our lives and more importantly putting a deadline on human life prevents us from seeking out certain kinds of meaning for example if a mayfly was born as conscious and intelligent as a human they could not craft a Shakespearean Masterpiece but not for a lack of skill but a lack of time if death keeps us from some mysterious Decay we've never seen then it also keeps us from new meanings we've never been able to pursue from rising to new heights we haven't yet been able to conceive of there's a video called long art by solar Sands talking through art pieces designed to play out over years even Millennia far beyond their lives and possibly Beyond Humanity itself if left untouched but these are rare projects hard to justify in an Ever temporary world but a bigs the question free of death what would you pursue if our sense of value comes from death then it necessarily skews what we must count as meaningful what projects might we pursue what identity might we find if we had two centuries let alone a millennia you might hike every mountain in the world master every Cuisine but one of the obvious answers is of course climate change one of the issues with solving climate change is that humans are incredibly good at dealing with problems and divining meaning from things which directly affect them but not so great otherwise if your house is on fire you know what to do but if your house will be on fire in 200 years from now when you're dead and gone and it belongs to someone else unless you fix the insulation now well that's probably their problem isn't it longer life would give us a longer view of meaning unlock New Joys and identities and values that we have no concept of yet it could even permit us lives of Greater moral purpose more than that plenty of meaning is independent of any deadly deadline the race to the moon wasn't against death but another Nation for Prestige for Pride whether you will be the next Shakespeare isn't really a matter of time so much as whether you get there or others do at the end of the Sandman hob gadling has given one more chance to end his life seemingly deep in his own misery but unlike Elena he chooses not to saying his girlfriend Gwen would kill him suggesting that even in eternity we can still Divine meaning from the constantly evolving RK and deadline of Human Relationships that there may never come a time we would prefer to die even in our misery because of the meaning we can find in each other and our choices inevitably have risk built into them if 10,000 years from now I choose to scale a mountain instead of help this person I will forever be the person who chose not to help that person but all of this is deceptive the argument is about how we live with ourselves when meaning slowly slips away from us when Decay is inevitable but that's already a problem we face in our mortal lives we already have to repeatedly find and craft new meaning and purpose for ourselves as we age purpose which inevitably decays well before death is ever on the radar immortality might compound these issues but it is by no means unique to it and so writers and philosophers have been arguing about Solutions since ever and so to find our answers I need to ask you to come with me to 177,000 years in the future in John Boy's 17776 or what football will look like in the future one day humans stop dying they just go on living forever and so what do they do they play football massive games with hundreds of players each side with football fields multiple States wide with games played over hundreds of years with bizarre rules that spiral into absurdity the sort of people who would enjoy playing football inside boris's Immortal Labyrinth thing city of nonsense architecture and one of these thousands of games takes place on a thin bit of land stretching from Washington to New Mexico only owing to some planning error the ball gets stuck in a canyon sheer Cliffs either side which neither team can ever scale without getting pulled down you can't move the ball forward can't move it back and so the 22 players fight on not for days not for decades but 13,000 years down in that Canyon if this sounds like a terrible game of football it's because well it probably is I actually don't know I've never watched a game of football but you start to wonder are these people happy aren't they broken in some way are they even human humans aren't to be like that right and voice goes on to say a human being will rarely admit this but they tend to be terrified of living forever now boredom is their only enemy and if you find yourself in a football game that's such a gargantuan task that seems undefeatable that will claim eons of your time and your passion I think that makes you one of the lucky ones existentialists like jeul satra though he protested the term offered one solution they argued that faced with a realization that everything we do ultimately doesn't matter we have to construct our own meaning and find joy in that but that's not easy that's not simple how are you meant to do that throwing ourselves down to be more and more involved in the world and importantly in each other we can find more meaning to satra death is the killer of meaning it always looms and prevents us from seeing greater meaning we might otherwise pursue the humans down in that Canyon are ultimately engaging and constructing their own meaning football gives you a Constructor dead line a constructed set of rules through which you can Divine success and failure and meaning and identity and relationship even though they know on some level that game will never truly be one that eventually people will forget this game is happening at all and they do that decay always wins and they're in an uphill battle against it but I can't stop thinking about that one line a gargantuan undefeatable task do you know the legend of Copus he was a Corinthian King condemned to push a boulder Upper Hill in Tartarus forever the parallels to the 22 players trapped in the canyon trying to push a football up an unscalable Cliff for 13,000 years are uncanny it is a sefian task the myth of Copus is also a book by absurdist philosopher Elber Kimu who tackles the same question what do we do about craving a sense of purpose and the realization the universe has none to offer Kimu calls for us to what he calls live in Revolt discard all hope that you can ever truly Find meaning and lose yourself in the struggle against this absurd Reality by living as best you can where existentialism suggests we can be at peace with our reality by finding our own meaning Kimu doesn't think we can ever truly be at peace with our purposeless existence a reality that an immortal person might grapple with even more and so life has to be a constant Rebellion resisting the horror by living as happily and as long as we can while pushing our boulder pointlessly up that hill for Kimu death is the end of that Revolt he implores us to fight and perhaps those 22 players at the bottom of that Canyon are doing just that they're laughing in the face of the Absurd never settled never at peace but pushing that ball up that hill regardless and living better for it your mileage may vary with absurdism as an answer to this problem but it is one we already face in our mortal lives so why not a longer one Viva La Revolution an immortal thing can be a meaning thing and yet Perhaps one day the day will come when none of these approaches are sustainable for us any longer we would have done all we ever wished or imagined we could we cannot sustain our Rebellion another day and at this point some stories suggest that death is okay Greg Egan put it well in describing a whole society called the transmuters in his book diaspora one of the weirdest books I've ever met who having done everything they wanted in the world decided to simply delete the elves from existence it won't be death the transmuters didn't die they played out every possibility within themselves that's not death it's completion if the tragedy of death is leaving life incomplete then the tragedy ends here and yet there's one line that people often pass over in the myth of Copus which has always stuck with me if this myth is tragic that is because its hero is conscious the workmen of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd but it is only tragic at the rare moments when he becomes conscious Kimu does not mean literally conscious here he means for us to be aware of our meaningless fate and B is alludes to the very same idea in the immortal that what is divine and terrible and incomprehensible is to know oneself Immortal to know what you're doing will ultimately never mean anything the transmuted were only conscious of their fate so long as they needed to be but other stories offer that no there is another way to go on that death is not the only option in alist Reynold Zea blue which I recently Learned was a love death and robots episode an immortal artist becomes obsessed with a color he only faintly remembers his art becomes saturated with it as he tries to Divine exactly where he knows it from why it's so special to him his art grows larger and larger till the pieces can't even be hosted on planets anymore Z uses these 10,000 km across canvases in space withholds Stellar economies competing to host his work zema achieves everything in artist could ever hope for money Fame influence revolutionizing the industry and he finally finds where that color comes from the color of the tiles in a pool he used to clean when he was a child see zema was once a robot vacuum cleaner of all things over the years he was built out made more advanced and evolved until he Acquired sentience and intelligence a cyber B from the other direction but it's the end of Ron's story which matters most to us having achieved everything he could ever dream of in his Immortal Life zema decides he is finished with Consciousness he decides to revert back to his childlike form as a vacuum cleaner and clean the pool with those blue tiles forever if the tragedy of Copus is being so conscious of our Boulder as zema was then the tragedy ends here if as bores says it is only Divine and teble to know oneself Immortal then he has achieved kind of Enlightenment but something would remain a little kernel of being enough of a mind to recognize its own existence enough of a mind to appreciate its surroundings and to extract some trickle of pleasure and contentment from the execution of a task no matter how purposeless the near mindless Euphoria of a pollinating insect that was enough for him Z here has accomplished what the transmuters have he has played out every variation of himself he can he's 100% of the game gotten all the trophies but he takes a different path zema chooses to become something else to transcend the human and in that find a new Happy existence literally change into a new kind of life with a new Consciousness a new way to continue the Revolt to construct new meaning when stamina runs out even if this is only putting off the eventual end a lot of these stories focus on how a longer life makes us inhuman but sometimes the better question to ask is what's wrong with moving beyond the human zema sought out a a lower level of Consciousness but many of these stories focus on technological augmentations that give them a different kind of existence perhaps one even higher than what Humanity has but maybe these don't make us worse maybe they just make us something new a new way for us to find meaning and identity and this might sound strange and alien and frightening but the truth is we are always becoming something new as we grow and age the joys we had as children are not the same Joys we have as adults the fears and desire and modes of existence we had at one time in our life are not the same as the next the meaning I have now is not the meaning I will have in my old age it won't even be the same body and so we ask what might we become what new existence might we seek out what new conscious reality might we continue our Revolt in maybe we ascended to a higher level of existence of cognition of awareness and in that New Joys new identity new Rebellion all of these stories in one way or another are about Decay about the inevitable decay of of everything you have known and loved about which decays we allow to happen and which we have no choice in whether we live a hundred years or a thousand but I don't know if I'm convinced death is necessary to Being Human as if our imaginations are so limited I don't even know if I'm convinced death is what we're truly afraid of as if that's the thing we're trying to run from Death is just a final symptom of a very specific kind of Decay we all have to Grapple with a Decay these stories speak to more real than the hollows more devast stating than sath the scalers more Universal than zma blue and more certain than the [Music] troit when you start the game the world of before I forget is largely colorless it liks texture and definition like a half rended asset that is until you move around and interact with things whatever you pick up slowly gains that color and texture as if the world itself becomes more real again by you interacting with it the things you don't make the effort to interact with remain alien there are notes from someone all over the house about the gas bill the fridge about the Absurd number of canned peaches you have in the cupboards for some reason there's this ever present sense of you fading in and out of the world only able to grasp at some small part of the full reality at any given time time passes randomly in the game suddenly flicking to day or night in an instant your name as you figure out is Sunita but about halfway through the game you suddenly need to go to the bathroom a minor task the sort of thing any other game would put in their tutorial to teach you WD controls but as you move through the house it changes around you doors open but go to Rooms they never did before hallway stretch and curve any orientation you've built up playing the game so far is gone a game which is entirely based around feeling your way through the environment takes that away until well the worst happens it feels uncomfortable it feels humiliating your body lets you down but there's an even sad kind of decay in before I forget as you wander through this house you find scraps of your life including a copy of the modern scientist Magazine with your face on the front cover but you don't recognize why you come across a trophy for scientific discovery of the Year awarded to you of all people but you don't even remember it wow that sounds impressive but I don't think it was me some of the most important parts of you are leaking out the cracks in your mind caught up in a Decay you can't control the horror of before I forget is unique a Decay more real than dark souls or the immortal or permutation City it's the inevitable and Unstoppable decline of our bodies and Minds as we age one which doesn't just take our future from us the simplest capacity to go to the bathroom but it takes our past too like do sun to Applebee people forget who they are they forget their families they forget themselves the things which make you who you are achievements loves failings they all fall through the cracks of our mind we do not become less of a person if we suffer from these conditions but we can feel parts of us we had before slipping away way humans have been living longer and longer but we can't always take our minds with us into those latter years soon it is Rage and anger at herself at the pain of forgetting is palpable the unfairness of it the rules changing around her you recognize the condition soon enough but Sunita doesn't recognize it in herself perhaps doesn't even want to throughout the game you also hear piano music your partner Dylan is said to be a classical pianist but as the game goes on the music starts to Decay it fills with static the notes are a little off it's hard not to see this as a reference to lilen cbies everywhere at the end of time a 6 and 1/ half hour composition and one of the most interesting and uncomfortable pieces of art I have ever encounted the music is deceptive it starts out coherent composed before a Decay starts to creep in the odd note might be off the Distortion is so brief and subtle you can convince yourself it didn't happen but then musical cues repeat and the static Creeps in till it's so loud that you realize it's there and suddenly you can feel where everything's going wrong progressively the music decays slowly at first and then very quickly losing definition and composition drones pitching in until there is no definition it is an empty echoing shell and all that's left are the hell signs [Music] no musical note can take shape in here no melody or identity there are brief moments of Lucidity cutting through vague hints of the past Distant Memories of a music you heard all the way at the start 6 hours ago as memories often linger in the minds of those Afflicted with the generative conditions the newest memories like sunita's Awards often go first the final section of lean's piece is called the long decline is over another word for Decay it is difficult to say the to find stories of immortality which are not in one way or another about maintaining some lost desired youth in the earliest Mythic stories of the Fountain of Youth the quest is more about finding Waters which might turn an old man young than the idea of living forever the philosopher stone confers not only life on those who create it but bodily youth even in siko in your final battle with giniro while the country is burning down around you giniro summons the leader of asena not just in his prime but his youth ially trying to revive the past and stole the inevitable Decay at the cost of his own life and body youth becomes the way to Victory to Vitality to something worth preserving these stories don't just Channel our fears of a nebulous eternity but of the loss of our bodily and psychological Integrity immortality isn't just about preserving it's about preserving a very specific version of us the version we see as our best as the most real authentic capable upon which our vision of ourself depends when these stories talk about immortality depriving us of our ability to find meaning it's hard to see how that isn't caught up in our ideas of Youth and being able-bodied and minded something that bodily or neurological conditions often coming in old age can interfere with this isn't even true necessarily but it is a fear a lot of people have the fear of getting old isn't just about the loss of bodily autonomy but loss of our position in society from which we often derive a lot of meaning the horror that one day we won't be able to write or talk or make art or keep up do things for ourselves that our own bodies will become prisons our own minds sinking sand when we're drawn to Nostalgia it's not just to the past but to a day we felt we were more beautiful our minds were sharper our knees didn't hurt when we were at the center of society after all retirement is often coupled with the loss of a job or children moving out when so much of the world exists in the online ever evolving technological Arena our bodies and Minds getting slower and losing the ability to keep up with the ever evolving Tech Oles of the world means being disconnected from much of the present Society the feeling of being a burden of loneliness is a legitimate widespread issue our meaning and identity are caught up even more so in youth more than they are in death when we imagine ourselves as largely as needing to write that book make that movie climb that mountain get that job before a certain age and era of Our Lives not before we die and especially before we lose the bodily or mental ability to do these things at all as Sunita loses her greatest achievements in The Labyrinth of her mind afflicted by her condition as her body fails her as she reaches everywhere at the end of time and the end of the age of fire Oscar Wild's The Picture of Dorian Gray isn't just about a man selling his soul to live forever but one desperately trying to preserve himself against the inevitable March of it how sad it is I shall grow old and horrible and Dreadful she jealous of everything whose Beauty does not die jealous of the portrait you have painted of me why should it keep what I must lose every moment that passes take something from me and give something to it it is no wonder the anti-aging movement has taken off in the age of social media where identity and value have become so wrapped up in one's appearance almost all of the stories we've talked about in this video speak to Immortals finding purpose primarily in Pursuits easiest when you have an able body and mind raising children games of physical prowess competition art with perfectly controlled finesse memory and building and more importantly these stories are about the horror of losing those things the horror here is not living without these things but losing them after finding so much of ourselves in them and knowing they are slipping away from us from our bodies and Minds for years and not being able to stop it for most of my life my grandfather was one of the most Physically Active handson do it yourself present in the world see everything do everything everything people you could imagine he was out sailing and fishing and building and Landscaping and he had this gorgeous house up on this hill right into his old age he was funny smart really withed intellectual sparring partner until one day several years ago now he was diagnosed with Progressive superclear py or PSP an extremely rare and aggressive neurological disorder caused by a buildup of these unusual proteins in the brain it started out in small things he lost his balance while walking he got Tremors in his hands or his muscles stiffened up so he couldn't pick up a knife or Fork but I think the thing I remember the most was his anger I watched him lose his ability to walk but before that his ability to work with his hands at all and he hated that God he hated it it made him so angry that this was his fate he couldn't Garden or fill out a fish or help with his hands in the way he used to and he could feel the whole time that's slipping away from him eventually he lost his ability to speak and he couldn't look you in the eye he felt his body mind were turning against him and so suddenly all of this happened in just a couple of years and he was angry I remember that so vividly angry that so much of what had given him meaning in life was just being ripped from him day by day week by week death was an afterthought compared to the Decay eventually my grandparents had to move out of their home up on that Hill a home I knew he loved it was full of all this sailing memorabilia he was a sailor in his youth but the stairs and the heights were too dangerous for him his own body could literally not exist in the place he called home even if his mind wanted to he never made it to their new home he was too ill he lived with us in those final days he lay on this bed mouth of gape death just one gasp away and his bad as it sounds I I really struggled to see him like that I struggled to to go to him and talk to him as he faced all of this knowing how much he hated the Fate life had left him to that he didn't feel like it was him lying on that bed anymore and I really didn't know how to face up to that when I finally went to him I remember thanking him not only for being the best grandfather I could ever ask for but because there's a decent chance that I wouldn't be doing this at all all if it wasn't for him he was the one who gave me my first tripod one day he came to me and he said hey use this and then when you're done with it sell it on trade me that's New Zealand eBay and I did I took it and what did I do I went out and I bought a $150 camera and I started making videos and I never looked back but I also know why I struggled so much in his final days the truth is I am terrified of of death the idea that I could just cease to exist one day and there is nothing I can do about that terrifies the hell out of me I am 28 now so statistically I'm about a third of my way through my life but I also know that when you ask people what the middle of their life is they tend to say somewhere around the age of 30 so in that way I'm already halfway dead but even more so I'm afraid of the Decay that might come with that I'm terrified of losing myself before death I'm painfully aware I have a countdown with these hands with which to write the stories I want to right or these legs with which to hike the mountains I want to hike limited time before my brain slows down and the world keeps moving faster when I think about immortality I'm thinking about preserving some semblance of who I am in body and mind I regret not spending more time with my granddad I am ashamed that I struggled to go to him when he was suffering because I was uncomfortable with watching someone suffer a fate that I might one day too it's a human response but still I know that if I was given a chance at Eternal youth I would take it and I'd love to say it's because all the Skeptics are wrong and and actually imal will be completely fine but if I'm honest it's because my fear of losing myself is probably stronger than my will to examine all of that particularly rationally so much of my identity is wrapped up in my life as a creative as a writer and those are inherently caught up in the parts of my body they're physical tangible things I need to protect my hands and my brain those are the parts of me that I would want to preserve as long as possible no wonder my Grandad was so angry when he lost the use of his hands or think about their minds as a scientist like Sunita does the finess of their finger as an engineer or artist those who suffer through conditions like this can become new versions of themselves just as worthy of protection and respect but it's hard not to see the sadness and what was lost in that transition unlike zema blue we do not get to decide who and what we become that choice is taken from us I don't know what lurks in my genes and I don't know that I would want to know my fate might already be written there but I don't think that makes it designed I don't think that makes it fear or deserved that I should just surrender to it death is already written into all of our genes at some point even we and our cells Decay and our ability to renew ourselves runs out but that doesn't make it right or deserv it does it we lament death but we Lament The persistent temporariness of Youth even more in that the further we grow from it the greater reminder of its value we get and in that immortality becomes more about reaching into the past than it does into the future of course even faced with the inevitable decay of everything we know we do try to immortalize some modicum of the meaning we have found through Legacy what we pass on the seeds we plant for later generations the art We Leave Behind it's weird to think that these 400 or so videos so far of me and my 20s are going to probably Outlast me in some shape or form deep in the bowels of the internet but they are not me not in totality and eventually they will vanish too my name will disappear right now I am standing in the ruins of a village in rural France from the 1790s right here there was a mill with people used to bring their grain from around and turn it into flour over there is the well where they used to draw up water it's since been filled in covered with Ivy and barred up so that no one Falls in other ruins are scattered around the fields just home to owls and rats now you might have heard them in this video funnily enough but they are all that is left of the people who lived here just a shadow of their handiwork I don't know why they cried or laughed they're crowning achievements I don't know what me meaning they found in this world don't they deserve to see what they might have become what new meaning they might have found I think my granddad did I think the 1.3 million people who died from tuberculosis last year did or the 700,000 people from malaria did everyone knows the first line of Dylan Thomas's famous poem do not go gently into that good night but fewer remember the second and rest old age should burn and Rave at the close of day rage rage against the dying of the light it's both a Vindication of this Quest and a demand that we make it worth it we have a ricated suffering after suffering already and what louder way is there for us to rage than to reject the death written into our genes I do not mean to say a longer life will not be fraught with its own problems that there will not be decays we must resist and fight off knowing when the age of fire needs to end matters but shouldn't we get to make that choice to rage to keep up that Revol as long as we can to not let the sun set until we are finished with it when we have as Thomas writes done every good made every difference I only rage because I am unfinished with this world as too many die already unfinished with theirs the poem ends with a man begging his dying father to fight on I couldn't help but see my own grandfather's righteous anger in those words and you my father they on a sad height curse bless me now with your Fierce tears I pray Do Not Go Gentle into that good night rage rage against the dying of the light [Music] stand up against the wall so I can trace you with one fine [Music] light we have become a home that's built of all your bones and M please don't disappear from [Music] it's not what you think it's going to be like but nothing ever is in this life it's a slow dance in Paradise when the world's on fire look from my [Music] eyes I know you are want to go and I don't blame you at all I'm learning my own skin in Reading what you wrote back then please don't disappear [Music]

Channel: Hello Future Me

Views: 376,849

Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to, frankenstein, altered carbon, orchard of tomorrow, immortality, immortal, arcane, sandman, existentialism, existential, philosophy, philosophytube, nando, sartre, 17776, sisyphus, diaspora, permutation city, zima blue, dorian gray, dark souls, elden ring, sekiro, before I forget, solar sands, curse, horror

Id: KAXaEdXd8wI

Length: 59min 53sec (3593 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2024