A Simple Question on Permanence

[Oso]

If you want to discuss the point you originally asked me to explain, I would be happy to join you. Otherwise, I wish you luck in finding someone to discuss your ideas with.

That is what I was trying to do. The life of a person cannot be equated with anything else. Not money, not houses not how your day is going. Even in an experiment the idea of 'quality of a life' rather than 'the quality (comfortableness) of a life' has no equivalency with anything else.

[u r a person 2]

And I congratulate you on your attempt! But I'm not going to discuss and evaluate all of the many assumptions you've made in order to get to the next stage of the discussion.

Now, I take what you're saying to mean that life is in a category all it's own, and that there is no way to differentiate the value of one life over another

But killing a fly is legal regardless of your motives. Killing a dog is illegal if your motives are sadistic, but legal for reasons of population control, to prevent the animal's suffering, and in self defense. Killing a human is only legal in self defense.

So clearly, as a society we have found a way to differentiate the value of different lives. I don't think it's a large leap from here to differentiating between different human lives. I'm not using this as an argument to justify greater harm against any human being. Let me remind you of my motivation for the argument. I think it would be more of an injustice to wrongly execute a man with a million years left in his life than a man with a far shorter life expectancy. Both are injustices. I'm against the death penalty for mortals. I'm more against the death penalty for immortals.

[Oso]

I'm against the death penalty as well.

And I guess you are right, we are at an impasse.

[ajfefijsleifjsa]

A child born is more likely to be a boy than a girl. Probably is the biological factor that makes males more expendable.

[PvtUrist]

With the comment on expendablility, here's an example;

2 villages both have exactly 50 male and 50 female, all considered equally healthy and fertile.

Village A loses 30 males, while Village B loses 30 females, and no further harming events happen for another 50 years, one village would likely end up with a far higher population than the other. A higher population meant more power, more resources and more likelihood of genetic survival.

Ofcourse, nowdays we have the priviledge to no longer care about this.

[PvtUrist]

Is it sexist? Yes in the sense of definition, no in the sense of negative stigma.

[ajfefijsleifjsa]

Village A loses 30 males, while Village B loses 30 females, and no further harming events happen for another 50 years, one village would likely end up with a far higher population than the other. A higher population meant more power, more resources and more likelihood of genetic survival.

Which village?

[PvtUrist]

Village A 20M 50F

Village B 50M 20F

Baseline 50M 50F

For simplicity (and me having no factual knowledge of it), we'll assume polygamy has no negative or postive effect on population growth in this statement.

Assuming the statement above, Village A and Baseline would have the same level of population growth, while Village B would have less than 1/2 of both counter parts, not counting expedition growth.

[u r a person 2]

what would the population growth look like for a group of 1 man and 50 women?

[PvtUrist]

I wouldn't know. I'll assuming it to be lower, but honestly I have no idea.

[ajfefijsleifjsa]

That one man could nearly double the population of thr town in one year

[u r a person 2]

i propose an experiment




seriously tho i think it would be pretty similar for a while and then a lack of genetic diversity might kill the village

[ajfefijsleifjsa]

After twenty years, the population should be around 15 times the size and would no doubt go off and establish connections with other villages.

[u r a person 2]

if there are other villages, then surely the one with more men and less women would just steal women from the group with more women and less men

duh

[PvtUrist]

if there are other villages, then surely the one with more men and less women would just steal women from the group with more women and less men

duh

This is accurate.

[ajfefijsleifjsa]

If they were angler fish, the men would all fuse witht the women. Some women in the male dominant town would have multiple fused men while the woman town would have battles for even one fused man.

[talah]

i propose an experiment

facepalming and smirking at the same time.

So from an ethics standpoint having patronised a Catholic school, if you are a man and are faced with a "choose one of the two only" decision to save your wife or save your child, the religion says you save your wife, because you and your wife can produce more children. I presume that has all kinds of things to do with effective love and sanctity of marriage as well - but that's the answer I was given by a very clued-on Nun at the time.

I also presume (but do not know) along the same lines that men sacrificing themselves for women (primarily) has roots in the biological fact that the incubating sex has a grounding time factor. Reproducing females have 9 months of pregnancy and more in nurturing a new life afterward, whereas inseminating men have just the act. I'm sure it's way more complicated but I can see the mechanical efficacy of that - as to inbreeding in a sufficiently small sample size - well I'm not sure how the catholic church would deal with that in a Year 11 ethics class but they didn't cover it in mine.

In any case

For the purposes of this experiment, sexual reproduction is also rendered obsolete.

[talah]

Well that's along the lines of the question I'm posing. If a person who had murderered someone could live forever, would they permanently be a danger?

So murder = 100% dangerous, and not murder = 100% not dangerous? Seems flawed.

What I'm asking is - what do we do with people we currently punish by locking up for life, if that life is suddenly eternity?

[talah]

Humanity as we know it would rapidly become... well, something that's not as we know it.

So immortality is the "gift" we've been given. What's the price we pay?

How much does this vaccine affect on psychological levels?

That's a very interesting way to look at things. It may or not be a "gift" at all.
I also hadn't really given consideration to a natural opt-out option - and as far as the price we pay - well that's mainly been covered in literature and movies and I'm not quite sure how you expect me to answer it :) Dorian Gray or Anne Rice I could give as references?

The constant is that when one person dies, for whatever reason, a new person is spawned.

[talah]

no, it wouldn't be inevitable

What then is the quality that inclines a human to cause the event of murder?

Nature/nurture?
Spirit/soul?
Something else?

I suppose you might propose that a person of infinite longevity would always become wiser as time passed and be less and less likely to harm another.

(and I'm also using "you" in the "royal we" form :P )

[talah]

The OP scenario would break down as I'm guessing that ALL crimes would be punished by death and the list of 'crimes' would extend to ridiculous extremes.

The original scenario could be modified to accommodate that kind of thing but it gets overly complicated I think.
I'm not considering life expendable, at all.

However, in imprisoning someone for the rest of their (previously) natural life, I would say harm is definitely caused, at least relative to the life they otherwise could have lived. (That harm or punishment is one side of the imprisonment, and future risk reduction is the other - along with some notion of rehabilitation I guess except in the case of the death penalty.) I'd argue that there's an equation differentiating a finite life of imprisonment to a certain amount (or proportion) of an infinite lifespan spent with the external harm of imprisonment, or risk reduction, applied to it.

The death penalty thing is a sort of option I intentially noted as something which exists. It also helps to make things a bit more black and white, or at least polarise scenarios and squeegee out what we think of as the nature of (say) murder and the punishment fit for it when the possibility of an infinite amount of rehabilitation exists.

[PvtUrist]

What I'm asking is - what do we do with people we currently punish by locking up for life, if that life is suddenly eternity?

The alternative of lifers without parole are ofcourse lifers on parole. Executions in our "civilized" world are considered too "barbaric", so lifers without parole are the substitute to that. It's used not because it's the best option, but because it's the most convenient one. Life becoming eternal simply tips the scale in what we classify as ethical and unethical (permenantly locking up someone who lives eternally may be considered ethically unacceptable, for example), and the wiseness that comes from long lives simply improves our capabilities to utlize the better option.

Nature/nurture?
Spirit/soul?
Something else?

I suppose you might propose that a person of infinite longevity would always become wiser as time passed and be less and less likely to harm another.

(and I'm also using "you" in the "royal we" form )

What would need to happen so that somebody like you/me will be judged guilty of commiting such crimes?

"Infinite longevity" is an interesting one, because something like x amount of years is calculatable, infinite isn't.

[PvtUrist]

and talking 5 years, or 10 years, or 100 years after the vaccine are different cases.

We're speaking with the mindsets from "pre-vaccination", so it could be difficult to theorize how the world would turn out after say 200 years of this.

Hell, we could barely tell what would happen 200 years from now without this vaccine, so there's that.

[PvtUrist]

I feel the issue is that it's either something we're not capable of (accurately) considering, or something that's with too little context to be accurate.

Say, the crime of murder. Aside from one person killing another (and not classified as manslaughter), that's about the extent of context we'd get.

Who committed the crime? What type of person are they? What were their motives? That's before mentioning every other factor that "murder" doesn't give context to.

[PvtUrist]

On the bright side, the next post's pagetop.