Narkissos,
How much more would be enough? What age would we ever accept as the "right age" for us to die?
I don't know yet, which as a reply is not to avoid the point, it is the point.
I think it's a good thing that death just happens when it does (so far!) because if we had to pick the day it would never be today for most of us, no matter how convinced we may be of its objective and even subjective necessity.
But extending human life in the way the "(pseudo?)"-sceintists suggest would presumably not mean picking the day of death. Much longer life spans would result in more people dying accidental deaths. So actually longer life spans could result in greater unpredictability surrounding the time of death. As it is people expect to live to around 80 years old or so and die from some age-related disease, unless something takes them sooner. In an era of longer life spans it may be much harder to attach reasonable general expectations to when your time might be up.
Liked the song, but strangely I didn't perceive the "yet" part. As I heard it, it's the heaven non-party that starts over again, not the real life of difference (that would be the Nietzschean "eternal recurrence").
Maybe you are right. Talk about the party ending and starting over again, "it won't be any different, it will be exactly the same", sounded like recurrence to me. This song resonates a lot with me because in the late 1980s, when my aunt, uncle and cousins were becoming Witnesses, my uncle was a Talking Heads fan who referred to this song as a reason for resisting the Witness narrative about endless life. I remember seemingly endless discussions on the subject, with my dad and others being involved. My aunt, uncle and cousins all became Witnesses in the end - and then drifted away - and yet here I am still.
Enjoyed the poem too. If you can read French you may like Baudelaire's last piece in Les fleurs du mal.
I don't read French sadly, and with my language skills such as they are I think I would need an extended life span to learn any other language, or even this one, well. Someone on another forum is trying to get me to read Baudelaire too - maybe one day.
First, I don't think anybody really comes to terms with death until s/he dies; and what I characterised as selfish was the hypothetical attitude of people who would never get tired of themselves (I doubt they exist, but they would have to in the hypothesis of everlasting life); self-centeredness, or egocentrism, otoh, helps a lot in never learning about oneself.
Well okay but what you wrote before was about the supposed self-centredness of people who "assume they want to live forever", not just the hypothetical person who actually gets there.
One lesson I learnt from Nietzsche (too late in part) is the difference between contempt and disgust. What you haven't had the courage to despise in time you're bound to be disgusted of later. And that may include much of your "self".
But, as you say, your "self" is not a static thing: you can change it as a matter of will, and it is also necessarily changed regardless of our will. Nature, as it is, dictates a cycle of change, and ageing and death are currently part of that cycle. But if we can create a society of change that does not include death, or significantly postpones it, and we can think of new ways of functioning, then why not? You could argue that all life beyond the age of reproduction is redundant. But we like to think we have made ourselves into more than simply machines for reproduction. Why should we not enjoy work, and creative and intellectual pursuits, and friendships, and online debates, for hundreds of years?
