A Simple Question on Permanence

[Cheery Dog]

That's not interesting though

[talah]

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.

I don't know that more context helps, really.

Classify murder as something equal between a person with a lifespan of (let's say) 100 years and a person with (because infinite is too hard) 100,000 years.

Then we've taken out that ambigiuity. The crime, whatever it is, results in us as a society, or a legal system, or as an individual judge, saying that a person spends their life behind bars.

What's the difference here? Are we talking now about different degrees of murder because the person who killed someone else has a longer lifespan?

To clarify - if the standard lifespan was 100,000 years, and you killed a person, would a just punishment be 100,000 years of imprisonment?

[PvtUrist]

To clarify - if the standard lifespan was 100,000 years, and you killed a person, would a just punishment be 100,000 years of imprisonment?

Lifer without parole is fucked up, period.

[PvtUrist]

I'm willing to go into it a bit more later.

[talah]

I think your point on longer lives being more capable of utillising better options was quite eloquent but the points you've surrounded it with seem a bit choppy :]
Not to say that's bad, at all, just that I don't get some of them.

[talah]

So for example if we're saying that each crime has some price or consequence, what would be the cost for permanently damaging another person with an 100,000 year lifespan?
What cost are we assigning here? Would you be permanently indentured to the person you damaged?
In this scenario would we be talking financial dynamics or something else?

[talah]

(this entire scenario is not far distant abstract if you consider the morals you would want to apply to an AI)

[PvtUrist]

I'm saying that we're trying to put something static (price) on something dynamic ("worth" of human/"pay" of crime), and without context that's never gonna be something that's accurate.

We're also working with this massive gap that we're unable to fill. Are we working off our current mindsets and law systems? Because that don't work because our laws are used towards people with livespans of a century, not thousands of centuries.

Mindsets and law systems of those who've adapted towards 100,000 year lifespans? I don't feel that's something we're capable of properly calculating.

[PvtUrist]

My reasoning still goes back to context, and how absolutely crucial it is, if we're looking to calculate the worth/value of crimes.

[talah]

okay, let's randomly create a context then and try to apply it to a short lifespan compared to a long lifespan

person murders someone over a lover's spat, finds partner fucking someone else (just for pleasure obviously because reproduction is no longer relevant)

jealously over intimacy is the motivation. murder weapon is a coffee mug to the head repeatedly.

person is sentenced to (pre-vaccine) life without parole because of the viciousness of the crime and to make an example of all would-be coffee cup murderers
vaccine is administered, life changes for everyone and the sentence has to be reassessed because suddenly life means 100,000 years

what's the sentence?

[TPFKAP]

This is a thought experiment.

Tomorrow morning, a vaccine is announced which is highly available and which provides effective immortality.
Anybody who wants the vaccine can have it without cost or judgement and therefore will live forever.
The vaccine halts the ageing process and removes all disease and entropy, but does not protect from external physical harm.

For the purposes of this experiment, sexual reproduction is also rendered obsolete.
Anybody who elects not to become an immortal being on this plane will die a natural death and will not be replaced.
There are however tightly controlled methods of asexual reproduction which will only ever maintain the population at a number equal to the number which initially elected to live forever.

The question is:

How would this alteration affect approaches to "permanent" methods currently used to address actions such as murder - assuming the current approach is the death penalty or life in prison; is an infinite amount of time long enough to reform every circumstance?

Everything just slows down forever anyway, so I would say yes.

[Cheery Dog]

What age do we give it to this vaccine to children though?

[talah]

Oh interesting.

Yeah the premise says stop aging and then says there is a method of reproduction to replenish any deaths.

So let's say that the reproductive method is cloning into adult form from pools of genomes.

Unless you want a shitload of infants wandering around. They're probably unlikely to become murderers.

As far as the existing infants, they can't have the vaccine untill they're like idunno 30? It fucks with their dna if they take it earlier and they melt into a messy pool of enzymes?
ymmv obvc

[vonflare]

here's a related thought experiment: imagine a fantasy world where humans and elves live in harmony. Humans live for normal human lifespans, e.g. 80 years ish, while elves live for well over 500 years before growing old.

Are prison sentence lengths the same for an elf and a human who commit the same crime?

[talah]

That's a decent comparison as well - although - you would have to assume that the humans and elves were otherwise identical aside from lifespan.
(Otherwise you have all kinds of RPG comparisons and I'll refer you to the Dragonlance novels as an epitome of this difference.)

In this case you'd be wondering what recourse is appropriate if a 30 year old elf (with 470 years yet to live) maliciously killed a 30 year old human (with potentially 50 years left)
And whether that would be the same if a 350 year old elf killed a 30 year old human.
Should the elder elf bear more responsibility due to their longevity, and presumably wisdom?

In a sense it's a similar question to what should happen if a 70 year old human kills a 30 year old human - except I think what I've seen in the current system is that the 70 year-old's life is limited anyway and the sentence will extend beyond life expectancy, and also, with aging toward natural death, there are considerations like mental degradation. I don't think I've seen much consideration given to wisdom increasing culpability in the real world.

[GrandWazoo]

here's a related thought experiment: imagine a fantasy world where humans and elves live in harmony. Humans live for normal human lifespans, e.g. 80 years ish, while elves live for well over 500 years before growing old.

Are prison sentence lengths the same for an elf and a human who commit the same crime?

What if a human kills an elf - does he serve the full 500 year life sentence? What if he pleads to first-degree elfslaughter? Parole in 250?

[Raskolnikov]

For the purposes of this experiment, sexual reproduction is also rendered obsolete.
Anybody who elects not to become an immortal being on this plane will die a natural death and will not be replaced.
There are however tightly controlled methods of asexual reproduction which will only ever maintain the population at a number equal to the number which initially elected to live forever.

seize the means of reproduction

[talah]

ohcomon okay okay
natural reproduction just doesn't exist anymore but bernie sanders controls these now-defunct means.

the system of replenishment is automated by a means-friendly robot who plucks out deceased humans and plants new ones maintaining the current number.

[PvtUrist]

we martix now

[Majiffy]

Permanence is a good Joy Division song. Also an okay Static-X song.

[Majiffy]

For the purposes of this experiment, sexual reproduction is also rendered obsolete.
Anybody who elects not to become an immortal being on this plane will die a natural death and will not be replaced.
There are however tightly controlled methods of asexual reproduction which will only ever maintain the population at a number equal to the number which initially elected to live forever.

seize the means of reproduction

How do I form babby

Oh you said means not memes

[Definition]

why can't the memes of reproductions be controlled by playing forum mafia instead?

[talah]

Unfortunately they are already controlled by MatPat of the Game Theorists.

[talah]

So anyway, slightly bringing this back to the original premise, I think we need to think about people as a bit more fliud and changeable than we do now - a bit more than we do when we lay down platitudes like 'old dogs can't learn new tricks' or 'a leopard never changes its spots', or when doctor phil (sorta validly?) compulsively says that 'past behaviour is the best predictor for future behaviour'.

We're all people is my overarching point; everyone human who is born onto earth, is. And I did want to underline that with longer lifespans we at least -should- as an evolving society of people, be moving toward addressing issues instead of dealing with symptoms.

And that covers things like understanding the causes of horrific things like terrorism and not immediately speeding past that into thinking that a flawed system of punishment will continue to be the best thing to do. If there's one thing I was hoping to get across in asking the question of punishments for folks with infinite lives, it's the distance between where we are now and where we may be someday.

We as people need to be constantly reviewing how we treat punishment with what we know, and striving to understand that when it comes to reasons that we would want to lock people away it is almost always a product of that individual's experience and not something inherent and permanently irreconcilable. At least that's roughly where I end up in thinking about how to treat others if they were permanent entities.

[PvtUrist]

'old dogs can't learn new tricks'

Metaphor contains the expected, not the exception.

'a leopard never changes its spots'

It's like comparing the ability to change psychological behaviours/patterns with the ability to change one's skin colour.

or when doctor phil (sorta validly?) compulsively says that 'past behaviour is the best predictor for future behaviour'.

See argument #1.

Agree with the rest of the posts along the lines of "we could do with stop being dumbfucks and actually solve things".

We dehumanize because "righteously punishing"

something

"lesser" and "inferior" is much more convenient than treating things accurately. Once that's no longer case, things will change, quite possibly for the better.