A Simple Question on Permanence

[PvtUrist]

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.

The other side of the coin is, if a person who had never up until now murdered someone, lived forever, would it be inevitable that they eventually murder someone?

It'll be more probably be (much?) more likely, but it does not guarantee.

[PvtUrist]

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.

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?

[PvtUrist]

How much does this vaccine affect on psychological levels?

i assume for thsi hpytheticcal experiment to work there is no negative effect

This makes it slightly more difficult to work with. It takes compromises to be making thoughts on an idea that by laws of nature isn't going to happen.

[PvtUrist]

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?

The current method is fucked. It may or may not become unfucked.

[PvtUrist]

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?

A person proven guilty of murder isn't enough context to prove whether they'd be a "danger", as the word "danger" itself is even more vague.

If people got immortal I'm sure they'll have no excuse to be able to do case-by-case and with context, as well as determine what exactly "danger" means to them, and what it means to others.

[PvtUrist]

We prioritize rescuing children over old people "Women and children first"

Also women, but that's old fashioned chivalry (sexism)

By biology, men were more expendable, hence this.

[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.

[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.

[PvtUrist]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[PvtUrist]

we martix now

[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.