Oct
21st
Thu
21st
Wildcat and Jason Silva on immortality
Wildcat: “And yet it is our desire and probably our duty to deny our biological ‘end-all time stop’ and extend the moments of pleasure of beingness into a longer state of existence, a state that will not be plagued by old age and illness, a state that will allow us to take our evolutionary destiny in our hands.
There are many reasons why we should want to extend our lives, to actually slow or even reverse the entropy of our bodies and the most natural may be because, it is simply the highest form of beauty we can conceive of.
To my eyes longevity and eventually immortality can and should be conceived as a canvas upon which we will paint our own masterpiece, a design of such grand proportions and ambition that to work it out demands time, lots of time, and hence a large canvas is needed, an immense all encompassing canvas, upon which we will brightly color our expansion into the universe. (…)”
Jason Silva: “Alan De Botton said that one of the reasons that sublime beauty makes us a little sad is because we implicitly realize that what it hints at is the exception. We see that beauty is transient and therefore we are moved not so much by its rapture but by the contrast of that rapture against its fleeting nature. We realize, in the shadow of the ideal, that everything is transient and we become hyper-aware of mortality, of entropy, of endings.
Everything dissolves in irony when we zoom out far enough… the only solution is to rebel against this condition- to insist on eternalizing the ideal. Immortality is a beautiful idea because it makes us all poems without end. Alan Harrington said “we must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody” The goal of humanity is to transcend death. The goal of humanity is for poetry, art, aesthetics, love and knowledge to be the only constants. Death and disease, mediocrity and limitations, should be phased out. (…)”
Wildcat: “We are at present accessing a universe in which the ballad that is the body will be turned into a grand symphony.
There is nothing natural, moral or ethical about dying of old age, nay, there is something totally unnatural about endings, about pain and suffering. The elimination of death, of pain and suffering is perhaps the most important human endeavor we have ever undertaken.
The reason as Jason Silva will have it, and I concur, is an aesthetic one, we need time to explore beauty, we need time to love, we need time for art and music and dance, in other words, time enough for becoming aesthetically pleasing beings.
I have no doubt that the drama of our sense thought reflections is about to turn into an explosion of senses, a revealing of almost magical proportions, turning us into enthused Gods indeed. The basic code of life having been unlocked we are now pressing hard into a future in which our genetic heritage and evolution has become an active choreography, a new mastery of life. (…)”
— Wildcat, Fresh from the Pulp The Aesthetic singularity or Turning into Gods a documentary by Jason Silva, Polytopia, Oct 16, 2010, See also: Spaceweaver, Becoming Immortal, Polytopia
