[extropy-chat] Essay on Physical Immortality

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Sun, 4 Jan 2004, Hubert Mania wrote:

> I strongly advice you to delete the "introductory" completely. If it would
> not have been for immortality I would have stopped reading after the first
> page.  [snip]

> If I were your editor I would advice you to cut it down to one third of the
> original volume and at least to do without abortion and euthanasia in the
> introductory, if you don't want to delete the introductory as a whole.

Hubert -- I believe Mark is intending this as an academic paper, not
for general consumption.  And I can state from having attended at
least one bioethics conference and having had a couple of college
level courses in philosophy this stuff of rights, shoulds, oughts,
cans and can'ts does get discussed in styles similar to that that
Mark is using.

I thought your comment about these things being "obvious" to people
with an ounce of common sense was interesting.  In my reading of the
paper (I'm about 2/3 of the way through) it seems clear that Mark
is trying to present a response to Kass -- that it is immoral
to attempt to prevent people from having access to life extending
technologies.  Throwing down the overpopulation argument as well
as others it becomes clear that there are some who lack the
"common sense" that attempting to interfere with an individual's
access to such technologies might be immoral.

It was only the use of the term "immortality" that I got stuck on.
We really need to come up with a better word -- making one up
if necessary -- to get to the point where the word means exactly
what we want it to mean -- nothing more and nothing less.
I thought of hyperlongevity and superlongevity but playing around
with the dictionary they don't seem quite right.  I managed
to come up with "itlongveos" - literally to go for long life
or close there to.  But I suspect someone with a better grasp
of latin or greek could come up with something better.
What I would really like is a word for something involving
an indefinitely long healthy life or life without limits.

Robert