[extropy-chat] Essay on Physical Immortality

[Hubert Mania]

Mark Walker  wrote:

> In case anyone is interested, I have a first draft of a paper on physical
> immortality.  http://www.permanentend.org/immortality.html It was written
> rather rapidly over the holiday season and so it suffers a little from WUI
> (writing under the influence). As always, comments are appreciated.

I have read your draft. I don't know what kind of influence you mean with
WUI, but - well, here are my comments.

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. An example: In the following short paragraph you use "permissible"
7 times and "morally" 6 times which is tiring and aesthetically inexcusable.
Academic readers might be used to this kind of style, a bunch of lawyers
maybe, but for normal readers this is indigestible:

"So, if X is ‘murdering an innocent child’ then it is not morally
permissible to do X, and it is morally permissible to prevent X. It is
permissible to prevent the murder of a child by whisking the child out of
the path of a car driven by someone intent on murdering. If X is ‘reading
the morning paper’ then X is morally permissible, and likewise, it would not
be morally permissible to prevent someone from reading her morning paper.
Sometimes answers to these questions do not dovetail so neatly, e.g., it has
sometimes been argued that, while euthanasia is morally permissible, it is
morally permissible to prevent euthanasia . . ."

What follows until "Global Triage" are exhausting examples about "Kill
Bill". Anyone who is not familiar with your character and your altruistic
aims might think you are obsessed with killing. I guess you are probably
not, but one can gain this impression. I believe the scenarios you discuss
here at length are obvious to anybody who has at least 5 ounces of common
sense in his brain. That's why I believe three or four short paragraphs
would have been enough.Once again: maybe academics enjoy this kind
of reading, but don't expect that a broader clientele reads any further
than the first page.

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.

I like your proposals concerning overpopulation though. This is something
worth to be discussed on a more detailed level with available statistics,
etc.

Hubert Mania