The Alchemist's Paradox
The Problem with Immortality
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ll live to 120 years. It’s not a wild prediction. Medical and technological innovations will propel humanity towards higher and higher thresholds, desperately trying to overcome the Malthusian problem — to no avail. Our drive to supersede nature and transcend death has been with us ever since we inhaled the Promethean fire. Alas, like Prometheus, there will be sacrifices, nemesis to our hubris.
Life is ontologically finite, whether you die right now or live eternally. On the other hand, a concept transhumanists tend to forget or rather ignore since it doesn’t serve their materialist outlook is this: metaphysically, life never begins or ends. It’s a coiling serpent, biting its own tail — a pictorial symbolism as old as civilization.
We have built-in buffer mechanisms and mind-instructions governing our sense perception in a way that creates the illusion of sensorial flow, duality, and… time.
Time, from a Kantian perspective, is merely a tool, a human tool we use to perceive reality. It fluctuates, it elongates, shortens and bends, giving space to experience or condensing the infinite into moments.
Time is an insurmountable roadblock to our physical immortality.
The Alchemist’s Paradox (Hypothesis)
The Alchemist manages to create the lapis philosophorum. The Stone gives him immortality. But the Alchemist’s perception of time will accelerate to accommodate the elongated lifespan.
1000 years will feel like 10.
10,000 years will feel like 1.
100,000 will approach 0, making physical immortality impossible.
The numbers are completely random, obviously, but the relativity of time according to, mostly, age is well-observed.
And I believe most of you have noticed it already. When you’re a kid, time is slow. But when you start getting older, time flies by.
There are many theories as to why this happens. Low dopaminergic levels, circadian rhythm alterations, kappa effect applied horizontally, the aging brain in general.
Personally, I think these are second order effects of lower thyroid levels:
But the specifics aren’t really important. What’s important is that the effect is real.
And while immortality seems like a goose chase right now, humans living up to 200, 250, 300 years isn’t out of reach. The results will be… incomprehensible.
Perpetual Adolescence
Everything in this post is a hypothesis approximating a grim prediction. But the one thing I’m confident about is this section right here.
I believe that the generational late blooming millennials and zoomers are experiencing has to do with an internal biological, adaptive mechanism signaling that 18 isn’t the age of adulthood anymore (relatively speaking).
The signs are everywhere. Emotional, teenage-like volatility well into our 20s, aversion to responsibilities and escaping the nest, low desire to tie the knot, physically immature.
Right now you’re thinking: “OK, but all of these sound like socioeconomic/environmental consequences”.
Perhaps they are! My counter-argument is that the conditions informing the current socioeconomic climate are the same conditions making the (bio)technology responsible for elongating our lifespan possible. In fact, who we are and what we desire is what technology becomes.
Our society reflects our intense desire to suspend death — suffering, to be more precise — , and technology is serving this goal, thus changing our culture to accommodate our ever-shifting, biological nature.
Still, this remains a prediction that will be tested in about 100 years for now (bookmark this, see you then!)
Sensorial saturation
Youth is highly impressionable. Both a blessing and a curse.
We can consume and integrate information quite rapidly, the brain being a blank canvas for novelty to spark up. Naturally, as we age, we become set in our ways, memories fill up the tank and are readily used to relate to and compare with reality.
But something interesting happens after a while.
There’s a ceiling we can’t quite break out from, probably related to the fluidity of our cognition curdling up.
We begin to mechanically interact with the environment, while mentally transforming each novel experience into a "past memory", reiterating the brain's computational output. Sense-perception is replaced by matching what you know with what you see.
The context of experiences doesn't change; the external is merely a reconstruction of the past, form at the forefront in favor of content.
Essentially, the past oversaturates your consciousness, resulting in fluctuating stasis where your ability to parse a new environment, accurately, diminishes.
So, even if you’re 200 or 300 years old, your relative age will remain static.
Unfair Advantage
The pool of possibilities will shrink every decade the birth rate decreases and the old guard remains in charge — amassing an unfair advantage over the young generation, further widening the gap.
History will slowly come to a halt, the old crones and wrinkly gaffers preferring conservation and the senile life, dying slowly by giving into torpor and passivity.
The spirit of youth will dim as the burst of energy and creativity flattens to a disappointing grind, over many (long) years.
Eternal wisdom will give birth to a society of puritanism, prudishness, caution, and boring contentment.
Programmed to Degenerate
Do you fear death? This question will surely pop up many times in your life. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a valid one but no answer can satisfy it. The real question is:
Do you fear life?
All our efforts to avoid pain, trauma, suffering have to do with our aversion to bloom into this world, not fear of death.
You can see this when “longevity experts” are popping metformin, eating raw food diets and fasting for days to end up living an extra boring 5 years… only to choke on raw liver at the end.
Immortality is earned by enriching, not extending, life. Your family, your work, your posthumous fame, the kind words people will say after your death. That’s immortality.
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