How to Live Forever
Everyone wants to live forever, but everyone has a different idea of how to do it. What does it mean to live? Medical life is the obvious answer: a beating heart and a conscious mind. Most people naturally seek out longer and healthier lives, more years to enjoy what life has to offer. Medical ethicists capture this idea in the metric "quality life years", which is used to compare the impact of different treatments and policies.
"Quality" is an important adjective here. Life without quality is no good. Most people would rather die than suffer in a hospital bed or a vegetative state. Too much emphasis on quality does lead to some odd behaviors though. In traditional Chinese culture, elderly patients are often shielded from grave medical diagnoses. Rather than burden the terminally ill patient with knowledge of their impending death, family members bear the burden and attempt to make their elders' final months blissfully ignorant. (This is the premise for the film The Farewell)
I think this emphasis on quality-life-years is rooted in hedonism and individualism; the goal of life is to maximize personal pleasure. I don't mean to disparage it -- I also hold this common viewpoint -- but I do want to explore some other perspectives.
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From a biological perspective, life is a self-propagating system with genes at its core. Individual organisms are merely a vessel, a tool for genes to multiply. To live forever genetically is to propagate your genes into perpetuity. You want to have more children and want those children to have more children to spread their genes. Moreover, you want others who share your genes to propagate as well; your family, your ethnic group, your species. Under this framework, Genghis Khan was more successful than Julius Caesar.
The logical extreme here is to have as many children as possible, and promote their reproductive success. Children are expensive though. A friend from college told me that in order to maximize his genetic success, he wanted to be a prolific sperm donor. Unfortunately, his ADHD made him an undesirable sperm donor; sperm is cheap and sperm banks do a lot of screening on the donor's attributes. Perhaps the best route as a male is to amass a horde of wealth and use those riches to pay child support for as many illegitimate children you can afford. That's basically what Elon Musk has done. Women have it much harder. They are limited by their gestational capacity, and surrogate mothers are expensive. Kinda dark.
This "greedy gene" evolutionary model can explain both altruism and xenophobia. For example, a parent may risk their life to save their child. Half of the child's genes come from a given parent. As long as the parent's chance of dying is under 50%, they should be willing to take a risk to save the child. If the victim is a grandchild or cousin, then the savior's risk threshold is 25%. The further they are apart genetically, the less risk the savior is willing to take. If there is some scarce resource at play, an agent might be willing to harm or kill distant relatives so that their close relatives can acquire more resources; thus, xenophobia and eugenics.
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A common afterlife trope is that you persist in the afterlife as long as someone in the real world remembers you. In Coco, the Pixar movie themed around Dia de los Muertos, dead spirits can only visit the living world if their photo is put up on the family altar (makes you wonder how they did it before cameras were invented), and spirits expire completely once nobody in the living world remembers them. Many people aspire to be remembered after they pass, even if they don't literally believe in a memory-based afterlife. The Gates Foundation, Carnegie Hall, Washington State, Bolivia, Einsteinium. Physical monuments are perhaps the longest-enduring, hence our society's obsession with gravestones. Some of the longest-remembered people are ancients with some kind of stone carving or monument, like Hammurabi and Tutenkamen.
This memory-based longevity is always presented with the assumption that you ought to achieve great things or cultivate a loving community in order to be remembered. But that's hard. It's much easier to min-max your way into cultural memory by doing something shockingly horrible. Assassinate a major political figure. Commit suicide in a dramatic and much-publicized way (see: Eric Andre). Construct a nuclear bomb and blow up a major city. You don't need to bear any ill will, just do it so that you'll be membered. Luigi Mangione is certainly more recognized than some no-name backroom policy who has put 50 years of their life into healthcare reform. Though time will tell if he's remembered as a hero or a lunatic.
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Human evolution has arguably transcended traditional genetics of DNA and chromosomes. Society is a powerful and ever-changing system, and human fitness seems to be subsumed by societal fitness. Societal traits like cultural values, holiday traditions, economic institutions and legal systems will propagate if they are successful and die off otherwise. Blue jeans proliferate and licorice candy dies off. These are memes as in the original Dawkins definition -- cultural genes. We have become Hobbes' Leviathan, like a giant multi-cellular organism. That social Leviathan can survive or die, compete and reproduce, just like any evolutionary process.
Thus, to maximize memetic life, you ought to promote those values and institutions you care about. Do you love math? Jazz? Single-payer healthcare? Teach a math class, start a jazz band, lobby for reform. Children are especially memetic. Impressionable youths are easy to convert to a cause, whether it's a music fandom, climate activism, or child soldiering. Parents, teachers, and Youtube stars have disproportionate influence over children, and thus greater memetic potential.
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My grandpa recently died, and the phrase "he had a good life" is thrown around a lot. He certainly lived a long time, to 91 years, and was relatively healthy for most of it. Genetically, he had two kids, three grandkids, and two great-grandchildren. Decent, though we'll see how far it goes with declining American birthrates. He will certainly be remembered by friends and family, but that will die out in a few generations. There's no way my children will remember him, and he's not rich or famous enough to have any biographies written about him.
The most I can do for him now is to prolong his memetic life, to cherish and pass on his cultural values. Grandpa cared deeply about his family and community. He displayed remarkable endurance in the face of hardship. He was a lifelong student and teacher, teaching medicine back in China and teaching English to Chinese immigrants at the retirement home. He loved to sing, to give speeches, to eat tofu soup and drink light beer. Even though my children won’t remember him, I can pass on these values to them, just as he passed them on to me. In this way, his spirit can live on a little longer.